History’s Fools

Lovely piece in The Atlantic by Jack Beatty. The gist:

“Paradoxically, the very scale of the debacle in Iraq may yield one long-term good: the repudiation of neo-conservative “democratic imperialism.” The Americans killed in Iraq will not have died in vain if their sacrifice keeps other Americans from dying in neo-con wars to “remediate” Syria, Iran, or North Korea. After Iraq, “neo-conservative” may achieve the resonance of “isolationist” after World War II — a term of opprobrium for a discredited approach to foreign policy, shorthand for dangerous innocence about world realities. Like the isolationists, the neo-cons are history’s fools. The strategy they championed was the wrongest possible strategy for the wrongest possible moment in the wrongest possible region of the world.

History showed what worked against threatening states — containment and deterrence. Behind them, confident of the melting power of its way of life, the West waited out Soviet Communism. Containment had its critics — a wing of the Republican Party demanded a “rollback” of Soviet power from Eastern Europe. The neo-cons are the heirs of rollback. They ditched the strategy that worked against a nuclear-armed superpower to launch a pre-emptive war against a toothless Iraq, which has been contained and deterred — and disarmed — since the Gulf War. They identified the wrong enemy (a state), attacked it for the wrong reasons (WMD), and in a way that strengthened our real enemy, the transnational terrorists of September 11. America has made mistakes in foreign policy, but nothing compares to this. In the larger context of the Cold War, Vietnam made a kind of sense. In the context of the struggle against Islamist terrorism, Iraq is an act of self-sabotage. Of the neo-cons and their neo-con war Auden might have written: ‘Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face’.”

Rumsfeld and those prison pictures

Thanks to John Robb for pointing out Seymour Hersh’s piece in the New Yorker, which opens thus:

“The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the America intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, ‘Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.’ The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, ‘Some people think you can bullshit anyone.'”