|
Note: This is a Text only archive. Go directly to the real forum.
The Irony of Iraq
- Click HERE to go to the original thread with graphics
banner
| The Irony of Iraq
- Click HERE to go to the original thread with graphics
|
| Ass Boil |
Quote:
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww...articleId=11560
The Irony of Iraq
The neocons have come to embody everything they once mocked and despised in '60s liberals.
By Harold Meyerson
Web Exclusive: 05.25.06
Print Friendly | Email Article
In the beginning, neoconservatism was a movement of onetime liberals enraged at the wave of violence and disorder that overtook the cities in the 1960s. Riots convulsed urban America in that stormy decade, crime rates soared, student radicals seized campuses. How could anyone see all this, the first generation of neocons inquired, and still remain a liberal?
For it was all the liberals' fault. Wafted along by their vaporous good intentions, indifferent to any unintended consequences those intentions might engender, wrapped up in their dizzy notions of the perfectibility of humankind, the liberals (at least, as the neos caricatured them) crafted criminal codes devoid of punishment, welfare programs requiring no work. In the world the liberals made, civic order took a back seat to individual rights, and as order vanished, the urban middle class vanished with it, abandoning once-vibrant neighborhoods for the safety of the suburbs. A neoconservative, the movement's founding father, Irving Kristol, famously observed, was a liberal who'd been mugged by reality. While liberals dithered, neoconservatives argued first and foremost for more cops.
Fast-forward four decades and we've come full circle. The neocons have refocused their attention on foreign policy and, in championing the Iraq war, have come to embody everything they once mocked and despised in '60s liberals.
Bolsheviks in the cause of their vaporous intentions, so bent on ignoring reality that they dismissed and suppressed all intelligence that prophesied the bloody complexities of the post-Hussein landscape, they conjured from nowhere and guaranteed the world an idealized postwar Iraq.
The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the need for civic order. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, said that the occupation would require many hundreds of thousands of troops to establish and maintain the peace, he was publicly rebuked by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's foremost neocon, and quickly put out to pasture. When the first U.S. official to take charge in post-invasion-Iraq, Jay Garner, called for a massive effort to train Iraq's police and restore order, he was summarily dismissed. When looting far more widespread than anything the United States had ever known swept Iraq's cities after Hussein's fall, Don Rumsfeld shrugged and said, "Stuff happens" -- a two-word death sentence for the possibility of a livable Iraq.
And now, just as middle-class Americans fled the cities in the wake of urban disorder, so middle-class Iraqis are fleeing, too -- not just the cities but the nation. In a signally important and devastating dispatch from Baghdad that ran in last Friday's New York Times, correspondent Sabrina Tavernise reports that fully 7 percent of the country's population, and an estimated quarter of the nation's middle class, has been issued passports in the past 10 months alone. Tavernise documents the sectarian savagery that is directed at the world of Iraqi professionals -- the murders in their offices, their neighborhood stores, their children's schools, their homes -- and that has already turned a number of Baghdad's once-thriving upscale neighborhoods into ghost towns.
Slaughter is the order of the day, and the police are nowhere to be found. "I have no protection from my government," Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni who has decided to emigrate, told Tavernise. "Anyone can come into my house, take me, kill me, and throw me into the trash."
Irving Kristol initiated neoconservatism at least partly in revulsion at the disorder of John Lindsay's New York. Now his son William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and the single leading proponent (going back to the mid-1990s) of invading Iraq, has helped convert neoconservatism into a source of a disorder infinitely more violent than anything that once disquieted his dad. To do so, he and his fellow war proponents ignored all credible information on the actual Iraq and promised an Eden more improbable than anything that '60s liberals ever imagined. "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America," he told National Public Radio listeners in the war's opening weeks, "that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all," he continued. "Iraq's always been very secular."
He wasn't entirely wrong. Iraqi professionals were disproportionately secular. Now they are packing up their secularism and taking it to other lands. The war, and the failure to establish order that led to the barbarism that's driving Iraqis away, can't be laid solely on the neocons' doorstep, of course. These second-generation neos needed a trio of arrogant, onetime CEOs -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld -- to actualize their vision. But actualize it they did, and the ideologues whose forebears once argued that the drugged-out Bronx was a monument to liberal folly have now made blood-drenched and depopulating Baghdad the monument to their own neocon obsessions.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post. |
|
|
|
| Ironpirate |
| They actually say something and not copy and paste liberal articles? |
|
|
| Ass Boil |
| Could you try that sentence again in english, please? |
|
|
| BeerPal |
Quote: Originally posted by Ironpirate
They actually say something and not copy and paste liberal articles? |
STFU. When have you ever posted something original and/or intelligent? |
|
|
| Turbo_Nerd_Eric |
Quote: Originally posted by Ironpirate
They actually say something and not copy and paste liberal articles?
"that buttf ucker assboil, as whenever he is challenged to offer his OWN opinions will now abandon his own thread and live his life as is he has once again offered proof of his superior intellect" |
Bahahahahahaha this guy makes George Bush seem eloquent. |
|
|
| cashflow |
| AssPirate... it's the Washington Fucking Post. |
|
|
| Ironpirate |
| another anti repub article .....and you ask yourself why you been losing? maybe if you werent attacking everything maybe people would like you... |
|
|
| cashflow |
| Losing? Losing the Iraq war or the war on terror or approval rate? Somebody's losing alright. |
|
|
| Ironpirate |
were losing, i dont think so
maybe if you and the media didnt want us to fail...then maybe |
|
|
| Turbo_Nerd_Eric |
| How is it anti Republican? Are you denying the facts of who served and who didn't? |
|
|
| NC-Stern-Mark |
Quote: Originally posted by Ironpirate
They actually say something and not copy and paste liberal articles? |
You fucking stupid piece of shit! If you just bother to read the fucking article, you might realize that it states the fucking obvious!
It's something I've been pointing out repeatedly, the reality of Iraq regarding the Sunni-Shia-Kurd factions and their inability to co-exist was totally ignored. Thousands of years of history told us civil war and chaos would break out but GWB insisted that they would be too busy throwing flowers at the American troops.
It is a monumental blunder. More so because this time, the intelligence was staring them in the face. It was ignored because it didn't fit in with the plan to invade and it was ignored because Rumsfeld didn't want to send in the necessary number of troops to quell the inevitable social unrest. This is the very reason, three years after the invasion, we are still suffering IED attacks in Iraq and the Iraqi population is embroiled in civil war. The decision to not send in sufficient troops appears downright treasonous in nature, especially when you consider the grief and harm that came both our way and the people of Iraq's way.
Paleeeeeze, take your fucking head out of your ass! |
|
|
| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by Ironpirate
were losing, i dont think so
maybe if you and the media didnt want us to fail...then maybe |
You mean the same media that reported every single pointless Clinton scandal? What was your excuse then, dumbshit?
If it weren't for the media helping him do it, Bush would never have been able to sell this fucking stupid war in the first place.
Post after post you complain about people "bitching", but still cannot prove wrong anything in the articles you are confronted with...
You are too stupid for words... |
|
|
| NC-Stern-Mark |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
You are too stupid for words... |
No, he's not really. Carl Rove knew exactly which words would appeal to dumb-ass neo-cons who bought into the "us and them" mentality. IP is simply a victim of a brilliant propaganda campaign.
The reason IP doesn't have the intellectual honesty to explain why he holds certain views is the key here. |
|
|
| Ass Boil |
| You are absolutely correct. But IMHO only weakminded fools can fall for such tactics... IP is beyond gullible. He really is very dumb and ignorant... |
|
|
| NC-Stern-Mark |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
You are absolutely correct. But IMHO only weakminded fools can fall for such tactics... IP is beyond gullible. He really is very dumb and ignorant... |
Oh I agree, I was only pointing out how effective the neo-con propaganda campaign is. It's tailor made for idiots like IP; white, neo-cons who think their race and culture is under attack.
The good news is:
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
The neo-cons run is over... |
|
|
| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by NC-Stern-Mark
Oh I agree, I was only pointing out how effective the neo-con propaganda campaign is. It's tailor made for idiots like IP; white, neo-cons who think their race and culture is under attack.
The good news is:
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
The neo-cons run is over... |
Not necessarily. The Republican neocon is done, without a doubt, but much of what a "neocon" represents is only about power, regardless of party. They wouldn't be able to get away with quite as much under a Democrat, but they do have people carrying water for them...
Check this out:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/28/204246/511 |
|
|
| NC-Stern-Mark |
Quote: Originally posted by Ass Boil
Not necessarily. The Republican neocon is done, without a doubt, but much of what a "neocon" represents is only about power, regardless of party. They wouldn't be able to get away with quite as much under a Democrat, but they do have people carrying water for them...
Check this out:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/28/204246/511 |
IMO, they are whistling by the graveyard, however, their point of view is one that will always find supporters.
One telling comment in that link was:
"There's always been a significant (if minority) isolationist bloc in the Republican Party. They're really of two minds when it comes to this kind of stuff... right now, one side is dominating, but it's only a matter of time (especially given the Iraq debacle) before the isolationist wing of the party takes back control."
I would guess, this is AKA The Pat Buchanan wing of the party.
I was really excited when Pat ran when for President on the Reform Party ticket but when I looked behind me, no one was there...
For those that may not know, the Reform Party planks include:
Maintaining a balanced budget, ensured by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and changing budgeting practices, and paying down the federal debt.
Campaign finance reform, including strict limits on campaign contributions and the outlawing of PACs.
Enforcement of existing immigration laws.
Opposition to free trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, and a call for withdrawal from the WTO.
Term limits on U.S. Representatives and Senators.
Direct election of the United States President by popular vote. |
|
|
| Ass Boil |
Quote: Originally posted by NC-Stern-Mark
IMO, they are whistling by the graveyard, however, their point of view is one that will always find supporters.
One telling comment in that link was:
"There's always been a significant (if minority) isolationist bloc in the Republican Party. They're really of two minds when it comes to this kind of stuff... right now, one side is dominating, but it's only a matter of time (especially given the Iraq debacle) before the isolationist wing of the party takes back control."
I would guess, this is AKA The Pat Buchanan wing of the party.
I was really excited when Pat ran when for President on the Reform Party ticket but when I looked behind me, no one was there...
For those that may not know, the Reform Party planks include:
Maintaining a balanced budget, ensured by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and changing budgeting practices, and paying down the federal debt.
Campaign finance reform, including strict limits on campaign contributions and the outlawing of PACs.
Enforcement of existing immigration laws.
Opposition to free trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, and a call for withdrawal from the WTO.
Term limits on U.S. Representatives and Senators.
Direct election of the United States President by popular vote. |
In other words, HONEST conservatives.... If a candidate who actually represented those ideals rose to the top, even I would consider them... It will never happen, though. The insane Republicans who need to get their base worked up over fags and flags are having too much fun right now... |
|
|
|
|
|
