July 21, 2003

And all the king's men  

Haven't weighed in on the whole Iraq debacle in a while, I actually find the situation pretty depressing and to a certain degree events simply speak for themself. But maybe a little bit of persepctive: looking back on the neocon plan for Iraq - for the whole Middle East, really - it's hard to see the American presence there as anything but an unquailfied disaster. I'm not talking about WMD - obviously that whole line of argument presents a problem for those who advocated the war, but it wasn't the central motivator for the neocons. They were more concerned with things like changing the balance of power in the Middle East, becoming the darlings of the Arab street, creating a base of uncontested US military strength in the Middle East, and controlling Iraq's oil. But none of these things have really happened - Saddam Hussein is still there, somewhere, and people are still afraid of him; oil prices haven't fallen as expected (even with pumps offline there should be some anticipatory price drop); the Iraqi people are becoming resentful of the American presence, and their resentment is manifesting itself not just in in terms of American casualties (which, after all, we hear are caused by a diminishing faction of Saddam's loyalists) but also as home brewed, free speech style protests. And while I'm happy that the Iraqi people are free to protest their government/lack thereof, that sure as hell wasn't the neocon plan. For a while it looked like there would be a positive outcome for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but now things seem to have stalled somewhat, and the Bush administration really isn't pushing that in the way that it was.

A lot of people are talking about the WMD scandal, with all of Bush's carefully misspoken declarations and all of our Freudian misprisions. (I'll probably come back to this soon, with all the black irony of the DPRK case.) They imagine that the Bush people have gotten what they wanted and now just have to play the game of belatedly getting their prewar ducks in order. But I think the Bush people are really sweating it, not because of this WMD stuff or because of the elections (I don't think Iraq by itself will cost them in 2004) but because their whole ideological basis for this war was ill-conceived, and they know it. There hasn't been a radical trasnformation of the Middle East; we haven't won unprecedented credibility in the Arab street; our military is under seige and we're begging other nations for help; we're expanding a force that was supposed to be overkill; Saddam Hussein is still alive; we don't seem to have disarmed anybody; democracy isn't working, and there aren't any serious prospects for it either. No, this war has won them nothing but a bloodthirsty public's transitory favor.

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