Geodog

The chickens come home to roost from the neoconning of America

Ever wonder why the Bush administration couldn't find an Arabic speaker to be Viceroy of Baghdad, but instead was stuck with monologuists like Garner and Bremer? You would think that it would make sense for the American ruler of Iraq to be able to speak to the Iraqis in their own language. While they may not be plentiful in the United States, there are over 400 Arabic speakers in the State Department, plus a number at the Pentagon and the CIA, as well as former officials from the Reagan and Bush administrators. Maybe because they all thought occupying Iraq was nuts? Certainly the best known ones, like Ambassador Chas Freeman, did. Look at what they were getting into:

Has any official United States policy in recent memory been as feckless as the Bush administration's for postwar Iraq? Can we, for a moment, recall just some of the assumptions that the administration announced or embraced? That Americans would be welcomed as liberators? That we could secure the nation with a force of a little more than 100,000 troops? That Iraqi oil revenue would be such that the occupation would pay for itself? That, in accord with our assumptions on troop requirements and postwar financing, we didn't really need the kind of international cooperation that the nation had historically sought for this kind of venture? That, in accord with the same assumptions, there was no reason not to enact more massive tax cuts for the rich?

With the revelations that have emerged of the degradation and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, it's become particularly clear that the administration gave no real thought to the challenges at the very heart of occupying another country.

Put it all the assumptions together, as Harold Meyerson did in his brilliant editorial and the neocon fantasy does seem nuts, doesn't it? The sad thing is, there aren't any real surprises here. Almost everyone of the people who knew anything about the Arab world said these assumptions were nuts before Bush started his war on Iraq. But that wasn't the answer that Bush wanted. Instead, he turned to people like Prince of Darkness Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (former registered lobbyists for Israel and Turkey), who gave him the answers he wanted to hear. What is the end result? I turn to Meyerson again:

the United States, and the entire Western world, are engaged in a long-term battle against fundamentalist Islam, a battle that ultimately and immediately has as its goal the Islamic public's support. At times that battle must be military, as was the case in Afghanistan after the al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Most of the time, however, that battle will be fought in the social, political and economic spheres, and it is on that terrain that the liberal democratic model will -- or should -- triumph. Which is why military occupations offer the worst possible terrain on which to fight the battle of ideas. ....

It defies all belief that the young women and men of an Army Reserve unit from West Virginia were some kind of sadistic cult just waiting to be called away from their civilian lives to torture prisoners in Iraq. I doubt they brought the hoods, the dogs, the nightsticks with them. They were doing the very dirty work of an occupation that, as it's developed, could hardly be more counterproductive to our ultimate goal -- the liberalization of the Islamic world -- if we'd planned it that way. But then, at the White House and at the highest (that is, civilian) levels of the Pentagon, every assumption about the occupation was rooted in fantasy. ...

I highly recommend reading all of Meyerson's editorial.