"What I don't understand is why Patrick Clawson, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, David Satloff, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and all those other Neocons who kept pushing this war aren't in Baghdad helping with the reconstruction. They have wealthy Likudnik backers who would pay their salaries to be over there. Some know Arabic. It is not as if they can't travel abroad. A lot of these guys have dual Israeli citizenship and/or have lived in Israel for extended periods of time, so why not Iraq? They keep mouthing off about how much more wonderful their supposed services (i.e. purveying Likud propaganda) are to the US than the academic Middle East experts. But in fact, Bremer, Abizaid and others actually accomplishing something in Iraq are products of American Middle East Studies (Bremer is a State Department Persianist, Abizaid has a Middle East Center MA from Harvard). In fact, the relative failures of the US administration of Iraq under Garner and Bremer, with continued lack of good security, and slowness in establishing new administrative procedures, should be blamed on the failure of the Conservative intellectuals to put their money where their (very big) mouths are and get over there to help ORHA instead of schmoozing with Bill O'Reilly on t.v. (Maybe Iraqi journalism needs some help, too, and big Bill could do an internship in Baghdad. This would have the double benefit that he wouldn't be polluting the US airwaves with his toxic bullyism while he was doing clerical work for Bremer). Anticipating that they will ask why I don't go myself, I would reply that I didn't push for this war in the first place; they did."
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