"Every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits...
Its (the Bush administration's) preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue...Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con...
But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind."
That agenda is permanent American military presence in the Middle East, engineered with this formula:
Invasion and "incompetent" occupation creates chaos.
Extended occupation is necessary to tame the chaos.
The occupation creates more chaos and never ends.
Which must be the goal if you’re investing in the world’s largest “embassy”—a Xanadu of air conditioned luxury larger than the Vatican, defended by 14 “enduring” military bases from Nasiriyah to Mosul. A unified and functioning sovereign government, representing the 70+% of Iraqis who want the U.S. gone, would never countenance the permanent squatting of foreign troops on native soil—the bete noir of genuine sovereignty.
The construction of these colonial fortresses has been effectively blacked out by our Pravda brothel of trick-turning pundits, who lament the supposed bungling responsible for the quagmire—ideological rigidity about laissez faire capitalism and democracy mistransplanted on hostile shores. "The Quiet American" sojourns in the Middle East with noble intentions, dashed by the fractious realities of tribal culture. The learning curve is steep, but with a few more tweaks, benchmarks and surges, our indefatigable “can-do” spirit will finally get it right and we’ll leave a friendly, grateful democracy in our wake. The litany of supposed blunders runs like this:
1. An occupation force of 450,000, recommended by Gen. Shinsheki as necessary to pacify the devastated country, is rejected for Rumsfeld's bargain basement force. CIA warnings about post-invasion anarchy are ignored. Only the oil ministry is defended by American troops—the rest of the government infrastructure is allowed to be completely destroyed by looting and vandalism.
2. The American army fails to secure Iraq's widespread munitions depots, the looting of which has supplied the insurgency's arsenal of IEDs, RPGs and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
3. Against the advice of the occupation's first viceroy, Gen. Jay Garner, the Iraq army is disbanded and all Baath party officials cashiered, creating a legion of disgruntled desperadoes. How will they fight? See #2 above, and:
4. In August 07, the GAO reports that 190,000 weapons supplied to the Iraqi security forces have gone missing—more arms to fuel the militias’ internecine bloodletting.
Sorry, but I’m no longer buying the Keystone Cops’ rubric. Bush may be crazy, but like his mother told us, “Crazy like a fox.” The whole crusade was kicked off with what many believe to a false-flag operation on 9-11, and it’s likely that manufactured terror attacks have stoked the civil war. Referring to the bombing of the Shiite al-Askari mosque in Samarra in Feb. ‘06 that ignited it, former CIA official Ray McGovern speculated:
"The main question is Qui Bono? Who benefits from this kind of thing? You don't have to be very conspiratorial or even paranoid to suggest that there are a whole bunch of likely suspects out there and not only the Sunnis. You know, the British officers were arrested, dressed up in Arab garb, riding around in a car, so this stuff goes on."
MCGovern is referring to three British SAS soldiers arrested by Iraqi policeman in Basra in Sept. ‘05—dressed in Arab garb and wigs, with a car load of weapons and bombs. To prevent any further interrogation and publicity of this compromising disaster, regular British forces broke them out by bulldozing the jail with a tank.
It may very well have been such a covert op team that blew up the Samarra mosque, and continues to foment strife. Because if the civil war ever ends, a strong Iraqi government will almost certainly send American troops packing. Many Americans, conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to growl and spit at anything labeled a “conspiracy theory,” will dismiss this possibility out of hand. America has a Constitution, after all, and it’s supposed to work just like we learned in grade school—everything by the book, on the up and up—none of that decadent skullduggery in God’s country!
But change the terminology, and it becomes more understandable—Machiavelli is alive and well in Iraq, simply practicing that most venerable and effective of imperial strategies: divide and conquer. And all the ineffectual, half-hearted opposition by Democrats and rogue Republicans (no defunding the war, no impeachment proceedings or even censure) is so much noise and thunder to pacify the public. There is no exit strategy, because there is no commitment to exit on either side of the aisle.
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