Neocon warblogger Michael Totten pimping warblogger Michael Yon’s new book:
Iraq is where ideologies go to die. Arab nationalism, Baathism, anti-Americanism, al-Qaidism, Donald Rumsfeldism, and Moqtada al-Sadrism have either died there or are dying.
There’s a tiny bit of truth, but a ton of horseshit and obvious evasion in that statement. Baathism may be dead in Iraq, but it survives in Syria. Al Qaeda’s leadership has remained intact and largely untouched by the war in Iraq, and though its local franchisees have taken a beating, it had little or no presence before our invasion. Moreover, as Michael Scheuer stated, Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a gift Osama bin Ladin prayed for but never dreamed would actually happen.
Similarly, it is very premature to pronounce Sadrism dead, especially given the fact he was a nobody before we invaded, and now is a powerful force in Iraq whose Mahdi Army was able to resist the attempted smack-down by the Maliki government in Basra. As for Arab nationalism, in Iraq it is shattered along sectarian lines, and of course has no applicability in the first place to non-Arab populations like the Kurds. But Anti-Americanism has risen markedly across the globe, a direct by-product of the Iraq invasion.
But the most glaring deceit of Totten’s specious proclamation is the omission of the single ideology which experienced the most complete evisceration in Iraq: Neoconservatism.
The Iraq misadventure started with the prodding of the neoconservative PNAC, which called the US to intervene in Iraq by toppling Saddam, arguing that this would usher in a new era of stability in the Middle East, a pax Americana. After five years of war, and the literal and figurative explosion of terrorism and destabilization, this supposition is wholly discredited. The notion that removing Saddam and installing democratic forms in Iraq would lead to a stable, pro-Western regime is an obvious fallacy. So much that one of the leading neoconservatives, Francis Fukuyama, published an op-ed in the New York Times, “After Neoconservatism,” announcing its demise.
The man championed by the neocons to lead the new Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, was the subject of a lengthy hagiography on the PNAC’s website, which opined: “Once Chalabi was chosen by us, everyone else — the Kurds, the Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs, the Turks, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Saudis — would view him in an entirely new light.” The Neoconservatives also lavished praise on Chalabi’s intelligence gathering:
“Chalabi also established his own intelligence service, which dwarfed the reach and understanding of the CIA’s clandestine service. . . . . we will be thankful that Chalabi can discuss in nuanced English the complexities of the situation on the ground. If we had to depend on the CIA’s intelligence resources, our understanding would be thinner, our approach much more likely to be wrong.”
Chalabi was the one responsible for bringing “Curveball” and all the “inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading” intelligence to make the case for war to the US. That being Colin Powell’s assessment of the product of Chalabi’s intelligence service. Just recently, Chalabi was removed from his government post and declared persona non grata for continued contact with Iranian operatives.
When it came time to staff the Coalitional Provisional Authority, the agency responsible for administering the US occupation, the Bush administration went straight to neoconservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation or the AEI to hire inexperienced but ideologically pure ideologues — who promptly made a complete fiasco of reconstruction and occupation, and managed to misplace billions of dollars while doing so.
The Bush adminstration has abandoned the glimmering neocon dream of a unified, secular Iraq, striking bargains with Sunni tribal leaders allowing them to form their own militias which have little or no allegiance to the Shiite-led central government. In Baghdad, we support a government formed around a series of Shiite religious parties whose leadership was sheltered in Iran during the worst of Saddam’s reign.
So if there is any ideology which has gone to Iraq to die, that ideology is surely neoconservatism. It’s fallacies have been exposed. The core incompetence of its advocates brutally exposed — the PNAC championing the Iranian grifter Chalabi, Bill Kristol dismissing the possibility of a Shia-Sunni rift in Iraq as “pop sociology,” or the experiment in conservative governance by which the CPA botched Iraqi reconstruction and pushed the country further into chaos.
But for people like Totten, who embraced the neocons’ ideology and has spent the last 5 years trying to rationalize the disaster neoconservatism has spawned in Iraq, the fatal damage which Iraq has in turn inflicted on the failed ideology of neoconservatism apparently must be denied.
OH! THE IRONY: a blog called, “American Power” says, Yon’s message is not likely to sit well with the denialist, post-modern antiwar left, followed by a quote from Totten declaring victory in Iraq, once again.
