Free the Godforsaken Wogs!

[kent_allard_jr]

Something always bothered me about the "neoconservative" project for the Middle East, and Matthew Yglesias has expressed it for me:

The neoconservative right's combination of gung-ho democracy advocacy and utter contempt for actual Arab public opinion is bizarre.

Not only was it bizarre, but the Iraq project has been a fiasco largely because of that contempt. Experts from the State Department, the UN and elsewhere had to be excluded because they were too sympathetic to Arab causes, particularly in Palestine.* The CPA was run by clumsy amateurs and by the time of the elections the country was ungovernable. The Iraqi occupation may have been a failure in any event, but the contradictions in neoconservative thinking made it infinitely worse than it had to be.

* I know some of them are friendlier to Israel, but they are a small minority. For every Bernard Lewis there are 10 Juan Coles. It's hard to spend your life studying people without taking their side.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if it is bizarre, or if such gung-ho unilateral bullying foreign policy decision making is more the norm for your country, and that the twenty or so years prior to the current Bush administration was an unusual period of clarity of thought.

The US has a long history of gun-boat diplomacy, and of using the armed forces to back up corporate interests at the expense of both private interests and civil/human rights. Smedley Butler's famous "War is a Racket" commenting so forcefully on this subject was written nearly 70 years ago, and Eisenhower's final speech on the dangers of the military industrial complex was made a scant half century ago.

Perhaps only now in this age of instant communications and much more rapid fact checking has the veneer been peeled off the previous unquestioned PR machine of a sympathetic media, and so allowing others to ask such dangerous questions.

::B::