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Douglas Feith, Bush’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy who supervised the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, has weighed in on Iraq.
“This is the education of Barack Obama, but it’s coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people [and] to the American national interest,” he told Politico. “The president didn’t take seriously the warnings of what would happen if we withdrew and he liked the political benefits of being able to say that we’re completely out.”
In other words, he would enjoy the approval of the American people who historically oppose war, especially after it is discovered the wars in question are predicated on lies. For Feith and his neocon buddies, though, this sort of approval is not only irrelevant. It is counterproductive. Feith’s role at the Pentagon was to invent lies and get an invasion of Iraq rolling.
After it was discovered the Bush neocons had lied us into war and the Office of Special plans was subsequently dismantled, General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, dismissed Feith as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet.”
Dumb guys, or rather unrepentant warmongers, are once again emerging from the shadows. The latest is Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and advocate of “permanent mobilization” (neocon-speak for forever war) against manufactured enemies. Mounting the neocon fount, The Weekly Standard, Boot urges a new influx of man and matériel into the emerging quagmire of neocon making.
“To break this worsening cycle of violence, the Obama administration needs to do something it has never done before — get fully engaged in Iraq from the president on down,” writes Boot who, of course, is not the least bit bothered by the $2 trillion plus of tax payer money squandered in Iraq or the stupendous loss of life.
“It needs to see if Iraq might be willing to accept the return of U.S. military advisers, intelligence personnel, Predators, and Special Operations Forces, along with enhanced military aid, in return for political reforms designed to bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together and thus eliminate ISIS’s base of popular support.
This would, naturally, feed into the other neocon pet project — emboldening and further arming the supposed rebels in Syria who are, in fact, the same guys as those now marching on Baghdad. Boot and the neocons, of course, like to pretend, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, that U.S. arms and largess is going only to “moderates” when it is in fact dispensed to al-Nusra and other jihadists.
“This would need to be combined with action in Syria to roll back Islamist advances there, meaning principally providing more arms and training to the nonjihadist opposition to Bashar al-Assad,” Boot writes. “This could be coupled with American airstrikes directed not only against Assad’s forces but also those of ISIS and other Islamist organizations such as the Nusra Front.”
For the neocons, creative destruction in the Arab and Muslim Middle East is an ongoing project. The collapse of their failed policy after a decade and the loss of more than a million lives provides a new set of possibilities and an extension of the war on terror, scheduled to last forever.
“This is the education of Barack Obama, but it’s coming at a very high cost to the Syrian people to the Iraqi people [and] to the American national interest,” he told Politico. “The president didn’t take seriously the warnings of what would happen if we withdrew and he liked the political benefits of being able to say that we’re completely out.”
In other words, he would enjoy the approval of the American people who historically oppose war, especially after it is discovered the wars in question are predicated on lies. For Feith and his neocon buddies, though, this sort of approval is not only irrelevant. It is counterproductive. Feith’s role at the Pentagon was to invent lies and get an invasion of Iraq rolling.
After it was discovered the Bush neocons had lied us into war and the Office of Special plans was subsequently dismantled, General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, dismissed Feith as “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet.”
Dumb guys, or rather unrepentant warmongers, are once again emerging from the shadows. The latest is Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and advocate of “permanent mobilization” (neocon-speak for forever war) against manufactured enemies. Mounting the neocon fount, The Weekly Standard, Boot urges a new influx of man and matériel into the emerging quagmire of neocon making.
“To break this worsening cycle of violence, the Obama administration needs to do something it has never done before — get fully engaged in Iraq from the president on down,” writes Boot who, of course, is not the least bit bothered by the $2 trillion plus of tax payer money squandered in Iraq or the stupendous loss of life.
“It needs to see if Iraq might be willing to accept the return of U.S. military advisers, intelligence personnel, Predators, and Special Operations Forces, along with enhanced military aid, in return for political reforms designed to bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together and thus eliminate ISIS’s base of popular support.
This would, naturally, feed into the other neocon pet project — emboldening and further arming the supposed rebels in Syria who are, in fact, the same guys as those now marching on Baghdad. Boot and the neocons, of course, like to pretend, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, that U.S. arms and largess is going only to “moderates” when it is in fact dispensed to al-Nusra and other jihadists.
“This would need to be combined with action in Syria to roll back Islamist advances there, meaning principally providing more arms and training to the nonjihadist opposition to Bashar al-Assad,” Boot writes. “This could be coupled with American airstrikes directed not only against Assad’s forces but also those of ISIS and other Islamist organizations such as the Nusra Front.”
For the neocons, creative destruction in the Arab and Muslim Middle East is an ongoing project. The collapse of their failed policy after a decade and the loss of more than a million lives provides a new set of possibilities and an extension of the war on terror, scheduled to last forever.
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