"Since Saddam Hussein until now, Iraq obeys only the force," Yousef said. "We are practicing the same old procedures."The article suggests that many top Iraqi police in Falluja were converted to US supporters because of Al Quaeda brutality. But will they be able to forget about Al Quaeda now and start hating the new enemy, Iran?
Whether you accept the finger-pointing at Iran or not, the barrage of attacks over Easter surely puts an end to the US media farce about how things are (finally) getting better in Iraq. Surely??? (Not).
Meanwhile Bush let his media slut tell the world how much he grieved the loss of 4,000 US troops. And Dick Cheney has the gall to say:
"It's a tragedy that we live in a kind of world where that happens."Juan Cole today channels Cindy Sheehan:
The Bush administration still has not told us why they died. It was not to protect the US from "weapons of mass destruction" (see below; that was a fabricated cover story). It was not to spread democracy. It may have been to nail down a major petroleum-producing country for US geostrategic goals (ensuring its resources were available to the US and could be denied if necessary to growing rivals such as China). If so, one has to ask whether the objectives (which were hidden from the American people) were the top priority for the US, or only for the petroleum industry; whether those objectives have been achieved; and whether there was another way to attain them. No such debate has ever been held. Was it in part to ensure Israeli security, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue (and Craig Unger implicitly argues, below)? If so, that should be stated, it should be debated. Even the former head of Shin Bet did not agree that it increased Israel's security. It is not right to ask men and women under arms to die for their country without telling them exactly how they are benefiting their country.Cole previously posted an excellent excerpt from Craig Unger, who reminds us that "the neocons had been hoping to start the war for roughly a decade before it actually began":
As their policy papers show, they knew they wanted to start the war long before the administration took office and in order to do so they knew they had to control intelligence. That's why Wolfowitz, Perle, and Eliot Abrams began making semi-secret trips to Austin as early as 1998 to convince Bush that an invasion was necessary. That's why, in December 2000, they tried to put Wolfowitz in as head of the CIA. And that's why, when that didn't work, they moved him to the Pentagon where he oversaw the creation of the Office of Special Plans which was in charge of putting out phony intelligence.Remember folks: support the troops!
Likewise, Cheney put John Bolton in at State to keep an eye on Colin Powell and to make sure that State Department analysts at INR( who had repeatedly discovered the errors in the phony neocon intelligence) were kept out of all the key meetings. As a result, Colin Powell made his presentation to the UN based on intel that came from the neocons in Cheney's office and the Pentagon--not the professionals at Langley and at [the State Department's intelligence analysis branch,] INR.
In other words, we went to war not because of intelligence failures, as X seems to think, but because of intelligence successes--successful black propaganda operations, successful disinformation operations--that were deliberately designed to mislead the American people.
As to why, again, I believe that Jim Lobe is on the right track. One has only to read the various neocon policy papers dating back to the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance papers(aka the Wolfowitz Doctrine), A Clean Break in 1996, David Wurmser's Tyranny's Ally in 1997, the PNAC papers of 1998, and scores of other articles to see that the neocons had been hoping to start the war for roughly a decade before it actually began. According to these papers, the chief reasons for this grand new strategy of overhauling the Middle East were regional security(ie, Israel) and to protect America's strategic resources(ie, oil.)
