The Long Shadow of Neoconservatism

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


The Long Shadow of Neoconservatism
James B. Rule ▪ May 6, 2015


[font size="1"]A U.S. officer leaves a recently bombed Baghdad police station, May 2007[/font]

The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War
by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 256 pp.

Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq
by Michael MacDonald
Harvard University Press, 2014, 336 pp.

[font size="4"]The great majority of the American political class were complicit in the deceptions that led to the Iraq war—and are desperate for the rest of the country to forget it.[/font]


Thirteen years ago—in the spring of 2002—this country was just beginning the run-up to its invasion of Iraq. For me, memories of this period have a dreamlike quality. Early that year, I heard from a well-connected Washington insider that U.S. foreign-policy strategists had decided to “do” Iraq, as he put it—that is, to invade—though the details had not yet been worked out. To an ordinary citizen and sometime policy wonk, the report seemed incredible, except for its authoritative source. Was it really possible for a decision of this magnitude to be taken behind the closed doors of the executive branch in Washington, before the idea had been announced to the rest of the country—let alone publicly debated? Yet little more than a year later, this country was at war. Congress, the courts, and much of America’s intellectual punditry had all played their appointed roles, and right on cue.

The dreamlike quality of my memories of this period results, I believe, from the total discontinuity between what every reasonable person seemed to know about Iraq at the time, and the lessons taught by the execution of the war. American public life has still afforded no comprehensive accounting of this massive disconnect. The reason for this is that the great majority within this country’s political class are complicit in the deceptions and negligence involved in making the war happen, or in acquiescing to its premises. Even for the minority who did not support, say, the congressional vote to authorize the invasion, it remains dangerous to call the cynicism and institutional opportunism involved by their exact names. Like some grotesque skeleton in a family closet, the orchestration of the Iraq war involved too many personalities still holding center stage to permit frank acknowledgement. If you crave an example of whistling past the graveyard, consider the circumlocutions we’re hearing from those now seeking the presidential nomination in 2016. “Mistakes were made,” Jeb Bush has averred, attributing those “mistakes” to “faulty intelligence.” Not exactly a lie, perhaps, but about as truthful as a claim that Saddam Hussein died of a stiff neck.

Two excellent new books—The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad and Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq by Michael MacDonald—target exactly the questions that mainstream political discourse wants so desperately to forget: why did the tiny elite who took the decision to send the country to war ignore so many red flags, so many advance indications of the disaster that was to ensue? Why did traditional conservatives, for example, abandon classic “realism” in geopolitical calculation? Why did liberals ignore a humanitarian catastrophe in the making? Why was so much expert advice ignored concerning such crucial matters as the role of Iraq’s sectarian divisions in any possible outcome of the war? What was going on in the minds of elite figures outside the core of “deciders” who took the initiative for war, as one by one they suppressed their objections? In short, how did an idea so obviously flawed ever gain steam?

.......(snip).......

Once the key administration positions had been captured for the neoconservative program, the rest of the country fell in line with chilling complaisance. Democratic foreign-policy heavyweights—including Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Richard Holbrooke, Sandy Berger, and Richard Gephardt—lined up obligingly to support George W. Bush’s war powers vote. In all these matters, elite status (or aspirations to it) seems to have conduced to backing for the invasion. In voting for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002, virtually all Republicans in both houses of congress joined in support. In the Senate, twenty-nine senators supported the resolution, against twenty-one opposed; in the House of Representatives, by contrast, the majority of Democrats voted nay—one hundred twenty-six, against 82 yeas. “Interestingly,” MacDonald writes,

. . . the stronger the particular Democrat’s national ambitions , the more likely he or she was to favor the war. . . . Perhaps because no Democrat who had opposed Gulf War I had been placed on the national ticket in the three intervening elections, every Democrat who voted on the question in the House or Senate and who would go on to run for the presidential nomination in 2004 or 2008—Christopher Dodd, Biden, Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, and Lieberman—voted in favor of authorization in October 2002.

.............................(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/neoconservative-iraq-war-muhammad-idrees-ahmad-michael-macdonald-review

[Gothmog]

1. The Neocons control Jeb which is yet another reason to oppose hin

[Hotler]

2. I could come up with a long list.....

of Neocons that should be rotting in prison and Dick Cheney would be at the top.

[malaise]

3. MUST READ - Get thee to the greatest page

Thanks for this