What Have we Learned Today?
BAGHDAD Gunmen hold sway over streets lined with concrete bomb-blast barriers and razor wire. Entire neighborhoods are too dangerous for police to enter.
The government, holed up in a fortress behind layers of checkpoints, huddles in emergency meetings and issues proclamations that draw little attention on the streets or in foreign capitals.
And this may be the best that Iraqis and Americans can hope for.
The surge of sectarian fighting after a Shiite Muslim shrine was bombed last week has dealt a hard blow to hopes for creating a functioning Iraqi state.
Now that the Iraq hawks are frantically dog paddling toward the lifeboats, it may be a good time to consider whether creating a functioning Iraqi state was ever such a good idea in the first place.
My question for those of you who championed this endeavor with wagging fingers and indignant scowls, vociferously denouncing its detractors as feeble-minded, gutless or worse, is this:
When all that remains of your sophomoric nation building experiment is a bloody, smoldering mess, will you concede merely that strategic mistakes were made, that plans were not executed as effectively as they might have been, that the administration might well have listened to alarms sounded by career brass, who questioned its assurances of adequate troop strength, or by policy wonks, who doubted its naive predictions of jubilant, teeming throngs greeting American troops as liberators; or will you realize, at last, that it is profoundly arrogant, presumptuous and immoral to embark on a twisted game of craps, dreamed up for their intellectual gratification by soulless ideologues in backroom think tanks, with the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings at stake?
Just asking.
UPDATE: The answer, via firedoglake:
Shameless.
UPDATE II: Robert Dreyfuss (via Digby):
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.
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