wolfowitz... still wrong.

Fuckity fuck fuck. I've heard others on the topic of how fucking awesome the invasion was. I don't know if I can stomach Dr. Paul -- the man too stupid to know he's stupid.
- mark 3-22-2013 9:43 am

The ones I can't stand are the Dems like Ezra Klein who still feel justified in supporting the invasion because Kenneth Pollack was just so darn convincing.

id have to go back and read it again (and i dont want to) but i dont think ezra still feels it was justified. but now as then, he can have an unhealthy respect for those in authority to know better.

id say pollack (or jonathan chait) still feels like the only problem was the way the war was prosecuted by the administration, not that the entire mess was pointless and wasteful.
- dave 3-22-2013 6:56 pm

He didn't say the invasion was justified, he said he was justified in supporting it, because of the non-existent pony Pollack plan: "when and if we did invade Iraq, we should do so only as part of a coordinated, multilateral operation that takes as its fundamental premise that rebuilding Iraq 'is likely to be the most important and difficult part.'" How about just not invading?
Dave, you always disagree with me.

i rarely agree with myself so you are in good company.
- dave 3-23-2013 5:47 am

ok, i re"read" it. he like chait does cling to the pollack dodge that if they had just followed pollacks map to salvation everything would have worked out fine. still his ultimate conclusion is that he was wrong to support the war because pollack was wrong, something pollack still seems loathe to admit to this day.

"I supported Ken Pollack’s war, which led me to support George W. Bush’s war. Both were wrong. The assumptions required to make them right -- Hussein had WMDs, Hussein was truly crazy, Hussein couldn’t be contained, American military planners and soldiers could competently destroy and then rebuild a complex, fractured society they didn’t understand -- were implausible."

i should add that doesnt absolve him of the stupidity of being willfully duped. anyone with half a brain could see there was no justification for invading iraq, only a desire to do so.

And that desire (to go to war in Iraq)  was based on which reasons? I just want to hear it.

have you been sleeping through class for the last decade?

if you want the strategic ideologue rationale read the original article at the top of the post. its well laid out on the first page. the cold war being over america could and should become the dominant force on earth, and to do so it needed to project power and must act preventatively to forestall future catastrophic events. iraq was the first viable test case for this policy. that iraq sat above strategic oil reserves probably did not hurt its case.

i think project for a new american century was mentioned numerous times around here in the run up to war. they were the embodiment of this ethos.


- dave 3-23-2013 2:45 pm

I didn't like the Wolfie thing because it was a framed as a letter to a brilliant mentor gone wrong. Anyone who said "It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself..." couldn't have been that smart to begin with.

Klein's non-mea culpa would be slightly more palatable if he slapped his head and said "next time milllions are out in the streets demonstrating I'm going to climb down from my ivory soap tower and ask why." Also nice would be "Could it be that the commons have more common sense than we Washington boneheads?"

Not the stated neocon pretense, but the real reasons. Like the oil reserve, extending executive power and guarenteeing a second term. Miss anything big? Besides juniors Oedipal rivalry.

The big puzzle is there were no good reasons for doing it, stated, covert, or idealistic. And no one really knows why we did it. Yet all the politicians responsible, and the big media voices that supported them, are still congratulating themselves, either for being heroes or heroes in error. I would bust Ezra back to the blogosphere and imprison Wolfie, but that's me.
- tom moody 3-24-2013 2:06 am

I just read the article and am now wading through the comments. Motive so far doesn't enter the discussion. But mentions been made that they surely didn't think there were WMD. And it appears unclear that Israel wanted us in. Back to comments...
- bill 3-24-2013 2:57 am

R Perle ( on was it worth it): Not a reasonable question.

wapo quiet

In the story at your Perle link, WaPo guy Ignatius apologizes for supporting the invasion but even his non-mea culpa says, in essence, if only Bush could have done the nation building right. Not a shred of consideration that the war's muzzled opponents thought not just that the invasion was a crock but nation-building, too. All those critiques were there prior to the invasion but he pretends not to have read them. These guys have to waffle -- if they told the truth they'd have to conclude by saying "I let you down; I was a tool. I hereby resign."

The best reason I can come up with is that even though you may be the greatest power in the world, if you never act, eventually you will come to a point where you can’t act when you need to. So you have to have a war here and there. The reason Reagan and Thatcher were great is because they had Grenada and the Falklands; wars in the new world. Anything we do in Asia is going to be a mess, so obviously the answer is to invade Cuba. Or Canada.
- alex 3-26-2013 12:42 am

im not sure i understand the question of motivation. what is forever the motivation for war... power and money and limited resources. 9-11 just gave them an opening and they took it.
- dave 3-26-2013 4:27 am

- bill 3-26-2013 12:25 pm

The opening was for Afghanistan, but they were greedy and wanted Iraq too. So they cherry picked rationale for war there. I don't think the Bush admin were true neo-con ideologues. They used them too, to enrich their  ivy league frat bros - oil boy circle (Enron, Black Water, etc.) and to strengthen the executive office. Parasites of Paul Virillo's Pure War - permanent war story

If the wars had gone better, the new Republican paradigm would still be in place by holding on to the indipendent swing voters.

this touches on Alex's point
- bill 3-26-2013 2:21 pm

if rumsfeld, wolfowitz and cheney werent neocons then the term has no meaning. and they made up, with their fellow travelers, a significant cabal within the bush administration, one that obviously steered us into war in iraq.

and yes, the military-industrial complex will benefit from war but to suggest that the neocons were merely ideologues and not fully vested partners in those enterprises is ahistorical.

also, enron is a bad example as they filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and i think they were primarily into electricity, the generation and trading thereof. and id have gone with halliburton if you were looking for an example of war profiteering.

im not sure what "the new republican paradigm" is but voters have short memories as bush the first can attest. once war fever dies down, economic interests tend to take precedence. so katrina and the housing bubble bursting could have easily sunk the prospects of the next republican nominee although its likely the democratic nominee would have been a war supporter had it gone better as you say as opposed to the obama the peacenik.
- dave 3-26-2013 3:07 pm

i have a hard time believing that bush was the strategic thinker and rumsfeld was just following orders. that exchange sounds pretty self serving in an effort to diminish rumsfelds culpability.

but the notion of building up political capital is probably true as even without building any up he acted like he had some mandate after winning the 2004 election. he even went so far as to spell it out as if saying it made it true.

Right meant Halliburton not Enron.
- bill 3-26-2013 3:46 pm

I'd like to think that there are two types of neo- cons. The cynical leadership ( 1%) and the followers (religious right who hope to get jobs from war economy and buy into the ideology wholesale but cast a blind eye to the evil at the top. Bush clearly defered to Cheney (top) but identified with the followers. Now he coasts it in painting dogs at home in the burbs and goes to church on Sundays.  Cheney I imagine collects his Halliburton ex CEO pension. His net worth said to be 30-100m $.

I would take it Lesar is a sock puppet and DC still runs the place. Accountant. They could do that with a handshake, right ?

"Saddam tried to kill my dad" makes as much sense as any other reason.
- tom moody 3-26-2013 5:58 pm

That takes it back off Dick and puts it on George. But it still works for them that they each had their own motives with a common objective. Agreed Don was blowing smoke doing damage control above.

probably a combo of arab hate (feith et al), dick and don's big stick and junior's infantile motivations + everyone will get rich indulging their pet cause
- tom moody 3-26-2013 9:22 pm

"strategic narcissism"

In a recent Foreign Policy article, neo-conservative Elliott Abrams, who served under Ronald Reagan as a top Latin America aide and then as George W. Bush’s senior Middle East adviser (with little Spanish and no Arabic skills, respectively) stressed that every administration should establish a “shadow government of presidential loyalists” to ensure that experts in the relevant bureaucracies do not wrest control of policy.

That approach was vividly described some years ago by Col. Pat Lang (ret.), a former Green Beret and the top Middle East analyst in the Defence Intelligence Agency who had spent most of his career in the region and who had been recommended to head the Pentagon office of special operations under Bush.

Asked by Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, a neo-conservative close to Abrams, whether it was true he knew Arabs well and that he spoke Arabic fluently, Lang replied affirmatively. “That’s too bad,” Lang quoted Feith as telling him. “And that was the end of the interview.”

Why?

-- "Ima war president". G.W. Bush
-- Oil (I give Bush Sr. credit for being honest out that.)
-- PNAC -- The US must not only be the only super power, it must also have hegemony over all regional powers within their own regional spheres.
-- Faith based intel on weapons
-- Stupidity & vanity of all the participants (government & media)
-- "He tried to kill my daddy." -- Vengeance is mine sayeth the GOP and US security bureaucracy (not just the shrub).

Why it went badly
-- Stupidity & vanity of all the participants (government & media)

- mark 4-04-2013 7:16 pm

Reflecting on this the other day: The very success of the arms sanctions in disarming Iraq was used as evidence that the arms inspections were not working. This goes straight to the mendacity vs. stupidity question. Yes, they were lying, because they had no credible evidence to support their statements. And yes, they were stupid, because they believed they would be vindicated. By whom? The little elves of "long range missles"? (Cousins of the underpants elves.)

Fundamental to my problem with these ass holes being seen in the media as other than exemplars of failure is the fact that they are not reliable tellers of their own history. They have demonstrated lack of a grasp of basic truth, either due to being dishonest or just being hopelessly clueless about fact and faction.
- mark 4-04-2013 7:31 pm

Wow, I did all that without out once saying "fuck" ... oh, crap.
- mark 4-04-2013 7:32 pm

I wrote my list of reasons before re-reading the thread. I think there's a certain something about the geography of the middle east. It wasn't just stupidity when Bush spoke of a "crusade", it was a Freudian slip.

The real case of WMD in a muslim country is Pakistan.

- Actual weapons.
- A well-documented history of sharing nuclear technology with rouge nations.
- Support for international terrorism, including the Hitler of terrorism, OBL.

But the confluence of oil, proximity to more oil, Arabs, Islam and proximity to Israel aren't there. So they're frenemies.

Okay, one last comment ... I was thinking about how to parody those who say and said "it's not about the oil." A random spammer picked on out for me.

From the Guardian in 2003: A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq." The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

i guess you are trying to make a "cant see the forest for the seas" analogy but i dont see how wolfowitz point that iraq was more difficult to bully, i assume regarding the non-existent wmds, because it had oil money makes the war irreducibly about oil. dont get me wrong, i believe it was about oil, i just dont think this is a particularly good example as to why.

but maybe im the idiot.
- dave 4-04-2013 8:47 pm

The main beneficiary of U.S. money, the Pakistani military, has never won a war, but, according to “Military Inc.,” by Ayesha Siddiqa, it has done very well in its investments: hotels, real estate, shopping malls. Such entrepreneurship, however corrupt, fills a gap, as Pakistan’s economy is now almost entirely dependent on American taxpayers. In a country of a hundred and eighty million people, fewer than two million citizens pay taxes, and Pakistan’s leaders are doing little to change the situation. In Karachi, the financial capital, the government recently inaugurated a program to appoint eunuchs as tax collectors. Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits.

agreed that's not the best example - dave can disagree with me (ha ha)
- tom moody 4-04-2013 11:54 pm

if agreeing with me is the only solution, tom, im fine with that.
- dave 4-05-2013 2:41 am

If Saddam had been sitting on a sea of diamonds, gold, platinum, rare earth metals, magnesium, etc., the situation would have been different.

Dick Cheney says "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy,"

Paul Wolfowitz says "Jeez, all that money Saddam gets from oil is a problem."

These two issues are fundamentally linked.

"Hey let's get together with Europe and crash the world oil market by reducing demand. You know, play a variation on the game the Saudis did when they fucked up Texas in the '80s."

vs.

"Kill the fucker, put our own asshole in charge, then we don't have to worry so much about all the damn oil money."
- mark 4-05-2013 6:49 am