The catastrophe that is the Bush administration’s “intervention” in Iraq is now clearly revealed for all to see, and there is currently a massive mêlée of neocons and other architects of that policy (including JWN’s longtime nemesis, Ahmed Chalabi) scrambling to pass off the blame for it to somebody else… anybody else at all.
Of course, their protestations of non-responsibility are inherently non-credible. They are even less credible than all the accusations they pumped up and circulated in the pre-war period about Saddam Hussein’s possessions of WMDs, his links to Al Qaeda, etc… which is to say they have no credibility at all.
But still, it is a wonderful sight to see these men– and yes, they all are men– scrambling to distance themselves from the sinking ship that is Bush’s Iraq “policy”, trying to grab for themselves any lifebelts of self-justifcation that might be around (though there aren’t many), while wildly pointing fingers of blame all around and savagely beating away the hands of any of their own one-time comrades also trying to grab onto the lifebelts they now claim for themselves.
At one point, I used to think we should tread gently and graciously with former participants in the Bush-war venture, calmly welcoming any expression of self-doubt they might feel moved to voice while not pointing too many fingers of blame of our own at those misguided souls.
I am almost past that now. The scale of the suffering they have inflicted on Iraqis (and along the way, also on Palestinians… let’s not forget that) is too large now for me to feel much motivated to stick to the niceties. I am feeling increasingly happy to wallow in the enjoyment of the spectator sport now being played out by and amongst these men before our very eyes…
Just in the past couple of days we have had:
Chalabi blaming Wolfowitz:
- “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge…
This is in a piece by Dexter Filkins that will be in Sunday’s NYT Magazine (Nov. 5). The text should be more freely available on Sunday, I think.
Btw, this piece also includes some intriguing vignettes from a trip Chalabi made to Iran in November 2005. Filkins writes about, “the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there.” After crossing a land border into Iran with Chalabi, Filkins discovers an executive jet waiting nearby that whisks Chalabi and the entourage to Teheran where Chala is almost immediately taken into a lengthy meeting with Iran’s national security adviser, Ali Larijani… And the next morning he has a meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…
Filkins quotes former CIA operative Robert Baer and former DIA analyst Pat Lang as describing Chala as, basically, an Iranian asset:
- “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections – he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.
Well, enough about Chala (for now.) because we also have, in a great piece rushed out under the title “Neo Culpa” by Vanity Fair’s David Rose, the following great tidbits:
Frank Gaffney, David Frum, and Michael Rubin blaming Bush himself.
Here’s Frum, the Canadian who as Bush’s speechwriter invented the whole concept of “axis of evil”:
- “I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. (!) And that is the root of, maybe, everything.”
Kenneth ‘cake-walk’ Adelman blaming Rumsfeld:
- “I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”
Oh, let’s not forget Rummy’s expensive new mansion in St. Michael’s, Maryland, while we’re at it. How much are these various pieces of real estate worth between them? I think that many people wronged by Rumsfeld in Iraq and elsewhere could bring a nice little civil suit against him and strip him off all his ghastly, ill-gotten gains pretty quickly…
And Rose tells us we also have:
Richard Perle blaming Condi Rice:
- “[Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly.”
For most of these years, of course, Rice was the national security adviser; and after she went over to the State Department her former deputy Stephen Hadley took over at the NSC…
Michael Ledeen blaming the women in the White House:
- “Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”
H’mmm. This is a new angle. Last thing I knew, Dick Cheney was probably the single most powerful person in the White House. Is Ledeen trying to tell us that Unca Dick is, secretly, yet another of the “women who are in love with the president”? Strange world…
Adelman also blaming Tenet, Franks, and Bremer:
- “The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There’s no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.”
But not him, Kenny Adelman, oh no… Of course, you can get a great behind-the-scenes view of the role that Adelman and all these neocons– and Chalabi– played in not only pumping up the threat of war but also determining the way it was fought, if you read Bob Woodward’s latest book…
Richard Perle blaming everyone except the neocons:
- “Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.”
… So yes, all in all, it is excellent sport to see the great falling-out among all these miscreants who took the US into the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is particularly excellent that all these revelations– from the Woodward book on, and including all these latest revelations– have been put into the public domain before rather than after the now-imminent midterm election.
I recognize that it makes very little difference indeed at this point to the traumataized and war-shattered survivors of the US-induced violence in Iraq whether any of these once-preening warmongers now feels regret or not about the role he had played in instigating, promoting, and executing the invasion. It might make a difference to Iraqis over time, however. For if we in the US who have always opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq can now take advantage of these latest revelations to gain increased political power and influence inside our own country, then hopefully the policies that emerge from Washington over the months ahead will be less damaging to Iraqis than they might otherwise have been.
As I have long argued, the best– or let us say at this stage, the least bad– policy that the US can pursue is one that works for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is speedy, orderly, complete, and generous.
Maybe this latest round of revelations will make it more possible to attain such a policy over the months ahead?
How are you Americans going to do any of that when you do not have an opposition political party ready to contest office. You just have another set of the one political establishment trying very hard not to promise to do anyting real about your foreign policy difficulties, and no sign that can be seen that your elites have had any change of mind. If you picked the very worst story you could imagine about the immediate future, it looks like you will do that. And how can you possibly, as a nation, show such cruel and complete disregard for the huge numbers of people you have maimed, tortured and killed.
You only seem to be concerned about your own soldiers, and even that concern seems to be a little….formal.
Too bad these aren’t presidential elections that are coming up in the USA. Then we could give Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and other key Bush Administration figures a “going away present” consisting of a paid excursion to Germany!
If the Democrats gain control of the House and/or Senate, as they seem poised to do, it would be clear that their mandate to power, as dictated by the people, calls for withdrawal from Iraq. There are some huge problems though, if the Democrats win (obviously we will be better off than under this one-party rule).
So imagine that the Democrats force us to withdraw, not a full immediate withdrawal, but a “phased” withdrawal. It is clear that if this was to happen, the American soldiers who are left will be much more vulnerable to attacks and we will find ourself in a situation where we either finish completely withdrawing and get away from this violence, or send in more troops to combat the insurgents. The second option will of course be pushed by the hawks.
Really the best we can hope for at this point, for the Iraqi people, is some kind of stability imposed by their militias. I don’t see the militias (or insurgents) going anywhere for a long time.
Anyway, we have utterly failed to provide Iraq with security and our presence there is not only widely detested but fuels more violence. I don’t see any alternative to a full withdrawal. We simply are not helping the Iraqi people by occupying them (though the inept reconstruction work is still vital).
Every one got his “cake-walk” in Bush Co. all happy they put blames on some one. But here we go who is that a brave Americans who could fix this miss?
This is question we should be asked? Is its Democrats? I don’t have faith in that.
as I said we changing face not Israeli pollices driving US in BIG ME and the BIG Israel Project in ME from Neil River to Euphrates River …
For Chalabi, with all what wrote about his relations with Iran, with these secrets and his behaviours with Iran, this is a media feed up, the reality is US, CIA and the Israeli Mossed working very closely on the ground in Iraq every poppets can’t move without their helps scope with their supports inside Iraq. Saying Chalabi went to Iran crossing the land borders making looks like a Hollywood Style Tripnanaza just a fake, he is the CIA man for long time, he is the back channel that US need to talk with Iranians, give me a break.
The reality is Iran working with US, Israel in Iraq the goal lets vanish a stat of Iraq.
To those who believe there is no love between Iranian ands US or Israel stays the course and the time will tell you…
Just recently the Israeli’s/Iranian who wish to go to Teheran, he can travel to Istanbul/Turkey and supplied with an official Iranians documents from the Iranian consults there and travel to Iran!!
Welcome to home of “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad he calls to wipes Israel from the map”
“…it would be clear that their mandate to power, as dictated by the people, calls for withdrawal from Iraq.”
Unfortunately not, Mike, in the absence of an organised mass movement for peace.
You have to conclude from the experience of the last presidential election when the peace movement voluntarily demobilised itself, that there is very little experience or understanding over there of the potential relationship between mass movement politics and electoral politics.
Without such a movement you have no means of having a positive or a negative effect on the vote of any candidate and no means of keeping the politicians honest when they are elected.
I agree with you Helena that the neo-cons in the Bush administration should not be let off the hook. For them to pretend now that they had no real impact on our Iraq policy is ludicrous. These people are shameless.
The idea that their views were somehow ignored by Franks and Bremer and Rummie is laughable. I remember a year or so ago Perle made a statement when he began to blame many of the Iraq policy failures on the US Occupation Authority in Baghdad. He said Bush officials erred in thinking they could set up residence in Saddam’s palaces and carry out a post-war democratization strategy like post-war Germany and Japan.
What was Perle’s alternative plan for success? He wanted to turn over governing control to Chalabi and his followers…as if that had any likelihood of working out better than the mess we are in today. The fact that these goons preferred to turn Iraq over to the Petra bank swindler who belongs in jail in Amman is, in my mind, an even stronger indictment.
There is no doubt that this bunch of war criminals must be held accountable. But how do we do that? I think it is essential to continue the campaign of public shame, pillory, tarring and feathering, etc. But they also deserve official indictment.
I doubt indictments will ever come from inside the system. And if they did the Bush team would escape justuce through technicalities or pardons. The reality is that the Democratic party leadership would prefer to whitewash the crimes of the past and simply resume governing where the GOP leaves off.
For this reason we should encourage any and all international campaigns to put members of the Bush team on trial. There needs to be a momentous reckoning that comes with the end of American imperialism. This should be a reckoning that shifts the nature of the game in Middle East politics, and more broadly in international politics. In other words, we should be building alliances across the board.
Patrick Seale wrote a recent article about the possibility the era of American dominance in the Middle East is finished, and he fairly successfully undermined that thesis by arguing that there is still no true rival to American power. What needs to happen is that a new and more permanent system of international balance be established, so it is clear that no future state can behave in the way the US has behaved during the last 5 years.
I think one key to accomplishing this is building up effective global institutions that allow a majority of states to check the outward agression of any one or few states, while also providing incentives for all states to behave in humane ways toward their own citizens. Never again should there be support for the idea of “humanitarian conquest,” where a few states presume to use the “stick” rather than the “carrot” to drive “bad guys” from power.
One of the truly disheartening aspects of the US invasion of Iraq was to watch so many liberals in America buy into “1960s anti-Vietnam war protester” Paul Berman’s thesis about Bush’s “just cause” in Iraq. Berman got the glossy treatment in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine, and his book “Terror and Liberalism” silenced many voices in this country that would ordinarily have opposed the insanity we have witnessed during the last three years. We need to be clear about the single point that no one was really allowed to make after 9/11: Western-British-American-Israeli heavy-handedness is what lies behind the terror problem in the Middle East.
I think we need to be honest about the fateful linkage between American and Israeli justifications of military force that bridge America’s conservative-liberal, GOP-Dem divide. For more than sixty years American and Zionist militarism has been justified because of the so-called lessons about “appeasement” prior to World War II. And yet we all know that the record of American imperialism and agressive Zionist colonialism precedes Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Hitler in the 1930s.
In other words we all know that the justification Paul Berman made for the use of military force against Iraq is false. It was and will always remain a red herring until we finally break this idol that signifies a worship of violence. Jorge Borges wrote a grim short story that deals with this point called Deutsches Requiem, and everyone should read it. Either one of our George Bush leaders could stand in for Borges’ lead character when he speaks about the dawn of a new world order. And the same obviously applies for a whole host of Israeli leaders.
I guess what I am getting at is that meaningful change will only come once we can change the nature of debate, once we can create an enitirely new allignment of political forces in the US and abroad, and once the entire international system operates on the basis of balance…a balance designed for survival not regular military conflict.
Bravo, Helena! What a great piece. (Pass the popcorn)
Every neo-con listed by Helena still advocates the bombing of Iran. The ‘need’ to bomb Iran has become the cause celebre of the neo-con movement.
It WILL come, and they will refuse responsibility for that disaster also.
And the main stream media will STILL give them a forum and treat them as serious ‘foreign policy experts’, as it does now.
.
In September 2003, Richard Perle said:
“A year from now I’d be surprised if there’s not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.”
What a brilliant insight, Mr Perle! What a big brain you’ve got!
He’s “getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war.”
Poor little thing. I only hope that, some time in the not-too-distant future, Perle will have a chance to explain all of this before a judge when he goes vacationing to his summer residence in the south of France.
Remember Pinochet, you neocons!
Berman got the glossy treatment in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine, and his book “Terror and Liberalism” silenced many voices in this country . . .
One of the silliest books I’ve ever read. I find it hard to believe it ‘silenced’ a single person.
“hard to believe”
David,
I felt the same way. Just having started my career in academe, I expected professors from the Vietnam generation to “get it” when it came to Bush’s war on terrorism. I expected them to encourage active and vocal opposition to the coming militarism.
Instead the majority had already looked at so-called Muslim radicals back in the 1990s, and gradually bought into Sam Huntington’s talk about a “clash of civilizations” after 9/11 happened. Once Berman published his little book, liberal American academe let out a huge sigh of relief, comforted by the belief that their prejudice against the Muslim world was somehow acceptable.
It may be hard to believe knowing what we know today, but Berman’s book, and his earlier cover story on the NYTimes Sunday magazine back in 2002, had a silencing effect in the place where you would expect to find vocal opposition: the halls of academe.
Following Berman’s work, and also the writing of Kanan Makiyya, a majority of professors on campuses across America believed they could take a principled humanitarian stand in quiet support of the pending invasion of Iraq. Or at least they felt they could hold their tongues, while communicating non-vocal opposition to their own consciences.
What is truly amazing is to read Berman’s preface to the second edition of his little book. This is in 2004, I believe. At the time he responds to a growing number of critics of US policy in Iraq, and he finishes the preface without apology, simply saying to the skeptics “read my book again and be convinced: Bush is right.”
Keep in mind Berman is a champion of Clinton/Albright policies, and a great fan of Germany’s Fischer. The idea that war protesters from the 1960s generation can abandon pacifism and learn how to use military force is apparently what makes his heart go pitter-patter. And a major US book publisher, WW Norton, apparently thought enough of his best-selling 2003 book to put out a second edition.
Hard to believe? I agree, but thousands bought his analysis. Go figure.
Helena:
The logic of events and the precedents of history would inform us that the withdrawal once it happens, as it inevitably would, would be anything but speedy, orderly and generous. It possibly may not even be complete, at least not for a while. I also think the historic continuity of policies pursued pre and post vietnam, and the forces that shaped them, is something that has not been sufficiently addressed. After all the neocons did not come out nowhere: many were either veterans of or influenced by that period. It is continutiy that informs the argument that the escalating militirism overseas for the last sixty years and the decline of the republic ideal at home are intrinsically linked. Indeed a messy reversal of fortunes of the Iraq (mis)adventure may be a necessary prelude to saving the republic at home. In the meanwhile the price the Iraqis have paid in blood and sorrow was unbearably high and is only likely to get higher.
The Power of Israel in the United States
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=18139
how can you coplain about the post war planning when you tell them it’s going to be a cakewalk ands we’ll be greeted as liberators?
cheney said right after 9/11 “saddam is fine, he’s boxed up, we’re after al queda”.
then these guys showed up and pulled off the scam of the century.
and rupert murdoch and FOX news continue as if all of this is no big deal. just the way things are.
atacking a country that didn’t attack us was a mistake, the execution of it compounded it but it was wrong and the neo cons advice affected all the decisions that were made. this is the great depression of our time and the neo cons are gonna have to pay
. . . gradually bought into Sam Huntington’s talk about a “clash of civilizations” . . .
Huntington’s book of that name seems to be more talked of than read. Huntington is no hawk.
http://www.aims.ca/library/huntington.pdf
David-
I don’t know what your intention is, or how far off topic you intend to let this discussion spiral, but if you are going to argue against my thesis–namely, that Huntington’s 1996 book, or better yet his 1993 “Clash of Civilizations” article in “Foreign Affairs,” led many liberals after 9/11 to accept the idea America needed to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as anyother Muslim countries that appeared as “threats,” then you need to quote from his 1996 book or his 1993 article. You are the one who suggested that people do not read what Huntington actually wrote in the 1990s, and yet in your last post you do not refer back to his 1990s writing. Instead you quote something he recently wrote in the present Iraq “Fiasco” climate, in which he goes on record in opposition to the general idea of foreign military ventures for the sake of building democracy abroad. There is no relation between these two issues. Count how many people who were gung-ho about fighting Iraq in 2003 are now abandoning Bush’s sinking ship. Huntington is just one of many. You can count him along with Perle, Adelman, etc., etc. Helena’s original point concerned neo-con hawks like Perle and Adelman. What I wanted to point out is that we need to understand that among those abandoning ship are neo-liberal hawks like Fukuyama, Makiya, and Huntington. Perhaps Huntington is closer to Fukuyama than Perle in his thinking, but this does not mean he is not a hawk, and it does not disprove my thesis. For you to suggest that Huntington is no hawk, or that the ideas he expressed in “Clash of Civilizations” were not hawkish, is just flat wrong. I will quote from Huntington’s 1996 book … a book that I read along with hundreds of thousands of other people. It is important to understand that when Huntington first developed his thesis, his aim was to counter the post-Cold War idea (partly expounded by Fukuyama with his resuscitation of Hegel’s “end of history”) that we would witness a “one harmonious world paradigm” (p. 32). Huntington was no dove who thought America’s universities could abandon “security studies,” and study war no more (p. 31). Instead, he was a hawk who thought universities needed to continue studying war to protect “Western Christian civilization” against Muslims and Asiatics. “The twentieth century conflict between democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.” (p. 209) Still not convinced? “The issues that divide the West and these other societies (particularly the Muslim world) are increasingly important on the international agenda….the West has had and is likely to continue to have difficulties defending its interests against those of non-Western societies.” (p. 186) Perhaps in your mind when Huntington wrote in 1996 about “defending” the West, he was expressing non-hawkish views about life in the “real world.” But we all know that “defense”-talk has long been a euphemism for war-talk, ever since the western Anglo empire renamed its “Department of War.” Going back to read Huntington’s words in 1996 one can almost hear the clatter of boot heels at the Pentagon, as generals and “defense” contractors eagerly awaited the dawn of a new extended era of state violence. Huntington sounds like Dr. Strangelove, anxious about the outbreak of global peace because long ago he learned to stop worrying and fell madly in love with the bomb. Huntington’s thesis of fighting Islam sounds like George W. speaking about his “new crusade.” No one wants to speak the word because it might incite Muslims to jihad, but we need to speak plainly: Huntington’s world-view is a mirror reflection of bin Laden’s. As I said, when it comes to the war on terror, there is little difference between Perle and Huntington: neo-cons and neo-liberals united in the new crusade. Huntington is a professor at Harvard, and for good reason the Harvard alumni banished Huntington’s kindred spirit, president Lawrence Summers, when Summers showed he would rather carry out cultural warfare against such friends of Islam like Cornell West, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, etc.
. . . if you are going to argue against my thesis–namely, that Huntington’s 1996 book, or better yet his 1993 “Clash of Civilizations” article in “Foreign Affairs,” led many liberals after 9/11 to accept the idea America needed to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as any other Muslim countries that appeared as “threats,” . . .
No. You may be right. If they did they drew different policy conclusions from Huntington’s analysis than did Huntington himself. He saw the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a problem to be managed, and he advocated managing it by de-escalation.
Huntington did not advocate, as I would, that the U.S. withdraw from its ‘global responsibilities’. In this respect his views were and are conventional. I don’t agree, but I still see a distinction between such conventional views and neocon recklessness.
. . . you quote something he recently wrote in the present Iraq “Fiasco” climate . . .
I wouldn’t call February 2005 ‘recent’, much less ‘present’. But basically you’re right. I neglected to check the date. I read ‘Iraq will only be the first in a series of incidents with disastrous consequences’, and wrongly inferred that it was written before the 2003 invasion. I apologize for the error.
My recollection is that Huntington opposed that invasion at the time. My googling failed (I now know) to turn up evidence of that, but it turned up none to the contrary either.
There is no relation between these two issues.
I’m not sure I understand this. If you mean that whether to wage war on a particular country is a different question than whether to ‘democratize’ that country, then that is certainly true. It seems odd to say there is ‘no relation’.
Count how many people who were gung-ho about fighting Iraq in 2003 are now abandoning Bush’s sinking ship. Huntington is just one of many.
As I have said, this is contrary to my recollection, but I have so far found nothing to cite on the point. Perhaps you have?
What I wanted to point out is that we need to understand that among those abandoning ship are neo-liberal hawks like Fukuyama, Makiya, and Huntington.
Fukuyama favored invading Iraq for some time, but thought better of it before the event.
I didn’t know Makiya had recanted. The most recent expression of his views I could find is an interview from last October.
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/48FE1E5B-F460-4A71-AB84-6E81D1EBB530.html
‘I, like many others, made many mistakes of evaluation, of judgment. But I don’t know how to look anybody in the face today and say that because things have gone wrong since the liberation, that it was therefore wrong to get rid of an extraordinary tyranny like [the one] we suffered under in Iraq. . . . I cannot ever say that it was wrong to support the overthrow of that dictatorship. And I challenge any human being to say to me that that was wrong.’
About what to do next, Makiya answered ‘Firstly, we need to stop pretending that everything is all right in Iraq, and the Iraqi government should be put on notice for the abuses that are currently taking place. It needs to be held accountable . . .’ His answer seems to take for granted that the U.S. will stay in Iraq and try to salvage the situation.
Huntington was no dove who thought America’s universities could abandon “security studies,” and study war no more . . .
We have a problem of terminoloy. You seem to equate ‘dove’ with ‘pacifist’, which I would not. I am a dove, but no pacifist. I would not call for universities to ‘study war no more’.
But we all know that “defense”-talk has long been a euphemism for war-talk . . .
If you are going to insist that ‘defense’ means ‘attack’, there’s probably no point in further discussion.
I see you agree there is no point to a spiraling discussion, but I want to thank you for your honesty. Let me know if you ever find evidence that Huntington “the dove” joined millions of people around the world in forthright vocal opposition to the war on Iraq. I prefer not to waste me time trying to sooth an amoral liberal conscience.
Perle’s idea was to equip a “liberating army” under Chalabi, perhaps consisting of a few humvees, flags, bugles, TV cameras, side arms, and Holywood issue uniorms and rifles. US forces would pound Saddam’s forces and send them running. Then the sole function of the US forces would be to escort Chalabi to Baghdad to take control. Then the US would exit in under 12 months. Of course, no one treated this seriously. Perle wanted to overthrow Saddam from the year zero, but is telling the truth when saying he had little influence in the actual war effort or reconstruction. Chalabi would probably not have lasted long, but Perle can retort, “Well, how can you ever know?” Most war proponents had day dreams of possible outcomes, none of them serously worried about sectarian strife, and none with an inkling of the difficulty of confronting an insurgency.
jkoch- they were full of fantasy and ideology, not knowledge. this is why I compare iraq to the great depression because that is what the “geniuses” who brought that on were full of as well.
Perle wanted to overthrow Saddam from the year zero, but is telling the truth when saying he had little influence in the actual war effort or reconstruction.
Perhaps so, but Feith and Wolfowitz were key players. Perle is not telling the truth when he claims the neocons ‘had almost no voice’.