The Neocons have always been wrong about everything, not just Iraq
by digby
For instance, here’s Fareed Zakaria from a few years back reprising one of their greatest hits:
It all started with the now famous “Team B” exercise. During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B–which included Paul Wolfowitz–produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated.
In retrospect, Team B’s conclusions were wildly off the mark. Describing the Soviet Union, in 1976, as having “a large and expanding Gross National Product,” it predicted that it would modernize and expand its military at an awesome pace. For example, it predicted that the Backfire bomber “probably will be produced in substantial numbers, with perhaps 500 aircraft off the line by early 1984.” In fact, the Soviets had 235 in 1984.
It turned out later that even the wimps at the CIA had hugely overestimated the Soviet threat. Similarly, in the early ’80s these same folks concluded that terrorism could never be effective without a state sponsor. Lo and behold, while they were obsessing over Saddam for more than a decade, they completely missed the threat of al Qaeda. And that’s just one example from the years leading up to the catastrophic decision to go into Iraq. At this point it’s deeply irrational for anyone who wants a serious analysis of any issue to look to these people for an opinion.
I also take some shots at the humanitarian interventionists who think that military violence can be judiciously applied in such exacting ways that only the “bad guys” will get hurt.
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