This William Kristol quote from this morning is another step in the eventual disavowal of Bushism. You see, just as it was in Vietnam, the know-nothings in Washington won’t let the military leaders take the gloves off which is why we are having so many problems.
This will, of course, be folded into the standard one size fits all conservative whine that alleges conservatism cannot fail on its own terms. Not even neo-conservatism, which isn’t conservatism at all except to the extent it prefers war over other means of change.
Indeed, the neos have the civil war in Iraq already built into their utopian vision. Much as David Ignatius said that if in 30 years Iraq is doing as well as Lebanon is today then the invasion can be seen as a success, for years some neocons have held that in order to make a nice US dominated Iraq, the massive death and destruction of a war and then civil war might be just what the doctor ordered. From a very depressing article by Robert Dreyfuss:
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous “Clean Break” paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : “The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq would “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.”
Such black neoconservative fantasies—which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will—have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
This is where the Straussian beast of neoconservatism rears its ugly head.[and says hello its mate, perverted trotskyism. ed] Their vaunted starry-eyed idealism about spreading democracy is a pile of crap. They, like all imperialists, seek domination. They went along with the cockamamie idea to give the Iraqi people the opportunity to surrender peacefully and do it our way. Those purple fingers should have made them feel really good about themselves. But they aren’t cooperating. Which means, sadly, that it’s time to accept reality. We tore the country apart, now we’ll let the crazy wogs have it out.
The big challenge now is to “limit and expedite the chaotic collapse in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.” When you look at it that way, everything’s going according to plan. Too bad about all the dead people.
Meanwhile neocon shills like Kristol will soothe the rubes with tales of how the Bush administration tied the military’s hands. If they’d have let them go they could have gotten the job done in a couple of weeks. We could have bombed em back into the stone age if necessary. After all, everything turned out just great with Japan and Germany. But, no. They wouldn’t let our brave men and women get the job done. (Of course you can’t blame them too much. It was the dominant Democrat hippies who made them do it.)
It gives the Republicans a good excuse to run on “restoring honor” to the country. The rubes eat it up and get all excited about proving ourselves in the next war. A war we must fight for freedom and democracy, of course. Because we’re so good.
Kevin at Catch is calling it a day and now I have one less funny blogger from whom to steal great material. Damn. I hate when that happens. He is one of those guys who likes to go into the belly of the rightwing blogospheric beast and examine the entrails with insight and humor. It is a valuable service and I will miss him.
We met (virtually, of course) during the Wes Clark campaign when both of us were asked to do an online interview with the general. Back in those golden, olden days, that was quite an unusual thing. We were asked to submit five questions. Kevin and I both asked four probing, deeply complicated queries about long term foreign policy strategy and one fun “personal” question. They picked the personal questions, of course. Kevin’s was “what’s your favorite salad dressing” and mine was “of all your postings overseas, what country did you enjoy the most?” (answers: vinaigrette and Panama.) I was lucky enough to get one “real” question in the mix as well so I didn’t suffer the overwhelming disapprobation of the Clarkies who accused Kevin of wasting the general’s and the community’s time with this silliness. (Clarkies are a serious bunch.) We bonded.
Kevin may be leaving the blogosphere but he will be long remembered around these parts. His memorial is the term “bedwetters.” That’s what I call a contribution.
I assume that Kevin knows his great eye and superior snark are always welcome on this blog should he feel the overhwelming urge to post. And you know he will feel the urge eventually. It’s hard to go cold turkey. Yelling at the TV just doesn’t have the same kick. Plus it annoys people. Your loved ones quickly realize they didn’t miss you that much after all and are relieved to hear the sounds of your angry typing. I’m guessing. Not that I would know, of course. I’m very even keeled.
Now, I’m not saying that I completely agree with this, but I do think it is worthy of a full, thoughtful discussion.
Note to wingnuts: In case it is lost on you, the sentence above is one I have found on right wing discussion boards regarding whether gays are moral lepers, abortion doctors deserve the death penalty, or whether torture may be a good thing on occasion. In other words, this is satire.
Ever optimistic, the Times surveys opinions on what Civil War would be like in Iraqif civil war comes. While there is much that is interesting here, I am also struck by the amount of naivete on display* and the poor organization of the article. For example, this would appear to be perhaps the most striking and important “news” to impart to Americans:
[Kenneth] Pollack cautions that a civil war could prove especially painful for the Shiites. There is no reason, he says, to assume that they won’t fight among themselves. The three major Shiite movements each have militias. Sometimes they have clashed… “There are a thousand Shiite militias that could do battle against each other, splintering even the southern part of Iraq.”
The way the story’s usually been played in the US press is that it’s Shia vs. Sunni. Not so. The situation is far more complex. So where does the Times put this important information? Near the end of the article.
While Pollack is right to point out the dangers of infra-Shia strife, he is wrong elsewhere in the piece to claim that such strife is the first thing one would see in an Iraqi civil war – Sunnis may be a minority, but they were, and still are, a powerful minority. The first thing you’d see, obviously would be something close to what we are, indeed, seeing: increasingly violent actions between Shia and Sunnis. Nor is Pollack accurate in opining that “a civil war could prove especially painful for the Shiites.” If nearly any Shia faction wins a violent civil war, Sunnis will experience major league political repression. As in state sponsored torture and murder. If anything, it’s the Sunnis who will find a civil war “especially painful,” assuming they lose. And, among many other factors, it is their desperation – rightly, they don’t trust a “legit” Shia government to treat them well – that is behind their present attacks.
Pollack’s emphasis on Shia-Shia conflict seems an academic distortion, going for the unusual angle. But that’s nothing compared to this unattributed whopper:
Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denunciation of the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra last week, in which he blamed Zionists rather than Sunnis, could be seen as an act of restraint, these experts say — an effort to play to Shiite anger without fanning flames between Iraq’s Islamic communities.
Now this is such an unspeakably stupid analysis of what Iran is up to that it could only come from a high Bush administration official. I’m quite serious. Another clue it’s from a Bushite is its sense of loony “accentuate the positive” thinking. And indeed, the context gives a pretty clear clue where this idiocy probably came from. Backing up one paragraph we read:
While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has proclaimed that the world has isolated Iran more than ever because of its nuclear ambitions, Iran has in fact tightened relationships with it local allies as events in Iraq have played out. In recent months, Iran has been deepening its alliance with Syria and the Shiite movement Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now it appears ready to strike up a friendship, backed by financing, with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denunciation …
Am I saying Condoleeza Rice is the moron who sees hope in Iran’s anti-Zionism/semitism? No, not exactly. But anyone who is making the fundamental error Rice is making – focusing on Iran’s “world” isolation while downplaying its strengthening of regional ties, including to Hamas – is quite capable of misconstruing Ahmadinejad’s remarks to mean Iran is not doing whatever it can to grasp as much purchase within Iraq as possible. And if it came to a war that led to Iraq’s total disintegration, it is unclear what Iran stands to lose.
The article also floats the idea of a negotiated breakup of Iraq into three states. Good luck. Who gets the oil regions, boys and girls? Who gets the desert? And who moves? And who sez Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are just gonna twiddle their fingers and not interfere?
There is much more interesting speculation and detail about how truly incredibly complex the mess in Iraq is, and how few alternatives exist that won’t quickly lead to disaster for the people of the region, and the people of the United States. Will Turkey invade to defend the Turkomen against oppression if Iraq’s Kurds officially set up on their own? Will the Arab League step in to intervene? And looming above it all are nukes. Iranian nukes coming soon. Potential Sunni Arab nukes depending on how the situation worsens (calling Dr. A. Q. Khan!).
So, Mr. Tom Friedman, are you enjoying the real live political experiment now? So, Mr. George Packer, still think that those of us who absolutely knew Bush/Iraq would open the gates of hell have “second-rate minds?”
Hey, y’never know! Maybe Ahmadinejad really was sending a signal that Iran wasn’t interested in an Iraq civil war when he blamed Zionists – Israel -for the attack. True, that could be because he wants to attack Israel first, but at least it’s not supporting civil war in Iraq!
Yes, it’s possible. And maybe there really is a Bigfoot. And maybe tomorrow, cold fusion will work and, as Woody Allen predicted in Sleeper, cigarette smoking will turn out to improve your health and longevity. You never know…
*I am no expert on the Middle East. Why am I so confident many of the “expert opinions” in this article are naive? Here goes:
To be deemed an expert on the Middle East, one would assume that the prerequisite would be fluency in several dialects of Arabic, fluency in Persian, fluency in Hebrew, and considerable time spent living and working in the Middle East. But one would be wrong. Most American “experts” in the public domain -there are real experts in universities, I assume – know one of those languages. At best, two. Many can’t read or speak any of them, and rely on assistants and clipping services for information on Middle Eastern press and mass media. Incredibly, language fluency is still considered not a requirement for marketing yourself as a pundit whose specialty is the Middle East. And many people defend this.
In my book, there’s a word to describe anyone who claims expertise in Middle Eastern affairs who can’t read Iranian or Iraqi newspapers, or needs a translator to understand al Jazeera, or whose experience of the region is limited to a guided tour of the pyramids or an overnight stay at the King David Hotel: phony.
Simple commonsense tells me that Iran stands to gain quite a bit from Iraq’s disintegration and stands to lose little even if there is furious intra-Shia civil war in Iraq. Simple commonsense tells me that when Iran sends a message to the world that Zionists destroyed the Shiite shrine, they are clearly trying to unify Muslims against a common enemy – Israel – and they are not saying anything, one way or the other, about the desirability of Iraqi civil war. Commonsense also tells me that when Iran’s president sends a message to the world, that message is intended primarily for Muslims and that US analysts make a fundamental error when it assumes “the world” means us.
I’ll gladly defer to genuine expert opinion on any of this, but I doubt that any seriously real scholar would make assertions like the silly ones cited above. Pollack’s sense that Shias would endure “special pain” in a civil war is vacuous and dishonest, used only to hype his superior knowledge of the complexities, but shows not a trace of any superior understanding. For one thing, “speical pain” is empirically unverifiable. Furthermore, his argument is naive in its assumption that a Shia/Sunni strife can never get bloody enough to meet most standards for what is meant by the term “civil war.”I’m afraid we are seeing Pollack proved wrong on a daily basis right now.
As for the anonymous misconstrual of Iran’s remarks, that is less naive than it is delusional.
Update: Pardon our dust. Yes, I know it’s a bit of a mess. Please bear with me. People much smarter than I are working on bringing this site in to the second half of the ot years. Thanks you for your patience.
And, no. The new design will look nothing like the one some of you saw earlier. That was merely a placeholder.
Never mind
This is not a permanent template. Please don’t waste your time commenting on its terrible/wonderful look.
I’ll tell you when the real transition happens. And then you can complain all you want. Comments will return I promise.
If you haven’t had any fun today, click on Lou Dobbs arguing with Joe Klein about port security. Klein, the pretend liberal in a balanced group consisting of Republican David Gergen, Republican Ed Rollins and Republican Dobbs, insists that if we don’t let this Dubai deal go forward, we will be causing ourselves some real trouble in the arab world. They are very sensitive to this kind of disrespect, you see. Changing the rules midstream is going to cause more terrorists.
He’s so right. America should do everything it can not to foment terrorism.
The waves of vengeance have left the majority Shiite and the minority Sunni communities feeling victimized and deeply angry with each other. Both are also resentful of the United States, which has been working to ease the animosity and coax Iraq’s various ethnic and religious groups into a cooperative government.
“The Americans also abandoned us extremely. They could have put some of their vehicles to protect the mosques — they have the forces to do that,” Khalaf Ulayyan, general secretary of the Sunni Iraqi National Dialogue Council, said at a news conference. “How does a civil war start? It starts like this.”
What a shame.
But let’s keep our priorities straight here. What we need to do is make sure that Dubai’s feelings aren’t hurt or things might just hurtle out of control in the mideast. We wouldn’t want that.
Rita Cosby said that it’s wrong that the Republicans in South Carolina are asking for church rolls to target the evangelical vote but it’s just as wrong that Democrats are targeting the “hoodlum vote.”
Yes, the hoodlum vote. When a plainly confused Chris Matthews asked what she meant, she explained that Democrats were going through voter rolls to find felons to vote for them.
Coulter even made comments about the physical appearances of those who were removed.
“Another attractive Democrat,” she said as junior Sean Hall, a man wearing a blonde wig, white sheet and a sign that said “Coultergeist” was removed.
“I think we should have saved the ushers some time and just removed all the ugly people,” she said.
During her question-and-answer session, Coulter responded to both fans and protesters. One comment that drew strong audience reactions came from a young man who asked her if she didn’t like Democrats, wouldn’t it just be better to have a dictatorship? Coulter responded with a jab at the way the student talked.
“You don’t want the Republicans in power, does that mean you want a dictatorship, gay boy?” she said.
The well trained young Republican borg had a ready defense:
IU College Republicans President Shane Kennedy defended Coulter’s comments by stressing that the speech was for entertainment and attendees should have expected Coulter to say controversial comments.
“I think the guy could have been more respectful to her,” he said. “I mean, we already know that she was going to be controversial and she was just saying what people were thinking. If you are going to talk like you are gay, then Ann Coulter is going to call you gay. Of course, she said it in a spiteful tone, but it was expected.”
On the other hand, she was quite upset that she had to deal with dissent:
“You are paying me to give a speech,” she said. “I mean, if you don’t want me to keep talking, that’s fine, but I think I’ll just do the speech. Hopefully, the idiot liberals will be out of here by the second half of the speech.
“You guys are doing a great job.” she said sarcastically later to auditorium ushers. “I guess they did hire Democrats as ushers.”
In other news, the mainstream media continues to wring their lace handkerchiefs about rude liberal readers.
Last night Kevin approvingly linked to the same William Greider piece that I did and said:
On a related note, it makes me feel almost nostalgic to watch the toxic stew of cherry picking, half truths, and outright misrepresentations currently being used to demonize the UAE as a virtual arm of al-Qaeda. You know what it reminds me of? The way Bush & Co. tried to sell Saddam Hussein as Osama’s best buddy in the Middle East. It’s poetic watching the Bushies squirm when they’re on the receiving end of this stuff.
I think this comparison is off base. To the extent it is demagogic, this UAE outcry falls into the category of political ox-goring, the likes of which are seen every day in our system. Comparing it to the lies, distortion and institutional manipulation that led the nation into a war is vastly overstating it.
This would be better compared to the white house having a fake case of the vapors over Newsweak reporting that Korans had been defaced at Guantanamo and “causing” the riots in the mid-east. The head of the joint chiefs of staff said the whole thing was used as an excuse by the heavies in Afghan politics, but that didn’t stop the administration from lecturing the press about revealing these accusations. Many people accepted the idea that Newsweak erred, particularly when it was shown that the report was unreliable. Bush and his boys had been saying that revealing information about torture and abuse was playing into the enemies’ hands for months, so this fit perfectly with their “loose lips sink ship” rhetoric. In this case, Bush has been saying “we’re fighting ‘them’ over there so we don’t have to fight ‘them’ over here” for years. Saying now that it’s ok to bring “them” into our ports creates cognitive dissonence. They have only themselves to blame for the outcry.
In both the UAE port outcry or the Newsweak outcry, the demagogic argument coming from the administration is that these things will harm our image in the middle east and make it more difficult for us to prosecute the war on terror. It works fine as long as it doesn’t conflict with one of their other demagogic arguments. But neither of these flaps come close to the invasion of Iraq for sheer bad faith and demagogic overkill.
Besides, there is a legitimate reason to be wary of the UAE being involved with US port management and calling it racism, in particular, is puerile nonsense. Like Pakistan, another close ally in the war on terror, the UAE have been playing both ends against the middle for a long time. We all understand that and accept it. They have to deal with the vicissitudes of their own political situation which doesn’t always accrue to our benefit. Welcome to the real world where the black and white formulation of “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” is shown as the bullshit it always was. As Yglesias says here:
… the UAE isn’t a strategic partner of the United States in the way that the UK is. The number of countries who have British-style security relationships with the United States can be counted on one hand, if not one finger. We share intelligence with the British that we wouldn’t share with Portugal, much less Dubai. An ally as close as Israel has been known to screw us over in defense and intelligence matters because, hey, countries have different interests. A private British firm operates in the context of the rule of law; a state-owned enterprise in Dubai . . . not so much. These are different countries in a thousand ways that have nothing to do with skin color. Pretending not to see the difference is childish and absurd. That a country hosts American military bases proves almost nothing — we have bases in all kinds of places.
I would suggest that if the UAE is holding access to their ports over our heads as a way to ensure this deal goes through, then we may have to evaluate whether they are even the nominal ally in the war on terror we think they are. That’s called blackmail. They can’t interfere with our domestic policies any more thaan we can interfere with theirs.