Warriors at home escalate policy war

WASHINGTON -- While the violence rages on in Iraq, the officers and officials fighting the war have broken down into two warring groups within the American Establishment. It is not too much to say that our future may depend upon which ones win.
Let's start with the positive -- in fact, the only hope for the future.
Gen. David Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, has turned his back on the neocons-ideologues-imperialists of early Bush/Cheney/-Rumsfeld, who still lurk in the shadows and are now pushing us into war with Iran. Ostensibly in their place, he has assembled a small band of "warrior-intellectuals," including, according to The Washington Post, "a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist and a military critic of the Vietnam War."
& quot;Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents," wrote Thomas E. Ricks, author of an excellent book on Iraq, "Fiasco," in the Post recently, "who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way."
Too-little-too-late?
This is, on the surface at least, a too-little-too-late return to our better and wiser military past, when strategies were built upon knowledge of societies and how to deal with them to get what you want. (One thinks of Gen. Douglas MacArthur who, before becoming the successful American "emperor" of Japan, listened closely to a Defense Department group of anthropologists who told him exactly how the Japanese would respond.)
Almost all of these new advisers to Gen. Petraeus, who has intellectually and instinctively understood the cultural levels of warfare, are trained in counter-insurgency, something inexplicably and wastefully ignored in Iraq for four long years. But time is dangerously short. These men should have overseen the war from the beginning, but the Pentagon bureaucratic mind-set is so great, its penalties (i.e., immediate retirement) so socially fearsome, that they spoke not a word.
In fact, one fears that the war is already over and the inevitable chaos is at hand.
So what about the second group, the original neocon-imperialists who, history will show, were instrumental in getting us into Iraq while America was stunned by 9/11 and easily manipulated into wars propagated by other interests?
Wolf Blitzer's extraordinary interview on CNN recently with Douglas Feith -- the former No. 3 man to Rumsfeld and the one in charge of the private, special intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, that is generally "credited" with getting us into Iraq -- showed us the embodiment of this crowd. In the face of the inspector general of the Pentagon's devastating report last week, which said that this "alternate intelligence work" of the Pentagon was "inappropriate" and essentially fed false pro-war intelligence to the Bush administration, Feith nastily insisted that they were right about everything, including Saddam's supposed relations with al-Qaida.
This is almost unbelievable, since all such speculation has been disproved a thousand times over.
But it shows the degree to which the neocons have not given up. Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Elliott Abrams, among many others, are all still lurking around and unrepentant. Abrams, who was in public disgrace after the Iran/Contra arms deal in the Reagan administration, is now Middle East specialist on the National Security Council and holds it in his hands to, among other things, monitor Iranian policy -- even though he and the others are actively working for America warring on Iran.
Pro-Likud lobby
For those who have forgotten, it was this group and others in the far right of the pro-Likud lobby in America who gave themselves away in a revealing paper for the far right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I recommend, particularly today, a reading of "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called for no Israeli retreat from occupied lands for promises of peace, for Israel taking the fight to the Palestinians and their Arab backers, and for the United States being encouraged to invade Iraq, where the Hashemite family of Jordan, friendly to Israel, would be reinstated to rule so that Israel "will not only contain its foes, it will transcend them."
The necons still control many of the thought processes, backed up by the intentions of Vice President Cheney and his American imperialist shop; the president himself, who cannot bear the idea of losing to his father's policies; some Christian conservatives; and an apathetic American citizenry who didn't have the faintest idea what was being done in its name.
Universal Press Syndicate