You think the Bushies could confidently and competently conceal the fact that they secretly believed _all_ the WMD charges were rubish? That would be a conspiracy of epic proportions, and, if they were capable of such a heroic conspiracy, you'd think they would've planted CBWs after the war while they were at it.
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I think that the truth of the matter is staring us right in the face: the Bush Administration believed that the Iraqi military possessed large stockpiles of banned weapons, along with elaborate, clandestine facilities for manufacturing more.
All of the deception, the manipulation of reports, the relentless effort to "sex-up" intelligence, was the work of people who had convinced themselves that this was so and viewed all evidence to the contrary as inconvenience to be finessed out of sight or massaged into proper form.
This does not mean that they believed Iraq to be a threat to the US, let alone the world. I'm certain that the thought never crossed their fever-damaged minds. But they were certain that the stuff and the infrastructure were there.
This really shouldn't be so surprising. If you believe that the US can remake the world, and similar dangerous fantasies, your level of resistance against other, related, ideological infections is obviously rather low.
We must abandon the view that Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the whole, empire gang are savvy strategists who see the world clearly and are making their plans with clear, if sinister eyes.
They are dangerous dreamers of the lowest and worst
sort - the kind of grandiose idiots Dostoevsky
described so well. People with latter-day Napoleon
complexes. A read of "Crime and Punishment" or "Notes
> From Underground" will tell us more about these
miscreants than a thousand parsings of Bush's halting
speeches.
Because their power base is Washington, the supposed seat of some new empire (and a more Potemkin village like imperial capital is hard to imagine), and they have immense engines of techno-destruction at their command, we stand at attention and, even in opposition, listen to their speeches and read their sober position papers carefully.
This is the wrong attitude.
They are fools and have unleashed a process that we'll be contending with for many years to come.
Consider, on the domestic side of this crime family, Mr. Ashcroft.
Do you think that Ashcroft is both a quasi-authoritarian AND an effective counter-terrorism AG? The answer's no. His strange love for abusing immigrants and battering the bill of rights makes him a person so preoccupied with various power fetishes that it is quite impossible his organization is performing the hard work of investigation with anything near calm professionalism or effectiveness. Doubtless, true leads have been dropped and false ones pursued aggressively because these people are gung-ho and well armed - but not terribly clever.
All of this reminds me of one of the aspects of racism people seldom think about: the racist doesn't merely refuse to see the hated Other as human, his dismissals prevents him from understanding that The Other is even capable of complex human thoughts and emotions. So, a racist cop, for example, wouldn't think that a Black guy could be responsible for complex, computer related crimes. This blindness would cause him to overlook good leads in favor of bad ones fitting his stereotype. You can think of other examples I'm sure.
You see a similar process at work in Iraq when American officials and GIs express shock and confusion that the Iraqis are not wildly grateful for their presence.
This is not simply naiveté, it is a profound inability to see a situation whole.
I'm a pessimist on this point and believe this tendency towards stupidity and blindness are universal human traits - sometimes dormant sometimes active - that will probably prevent us from rising to the various challenges we face. But that's my drama.
Regarding the Bushies, I think it's time we take the 'man behind the curtain' view we're getting seriously, the broken down drunk pulling rusty levers, and stop trying to see amazing plans within plans in every obvious stumble.
Cheney and Powell probably live in the real world, more or less. But the rest of them are nitwits masquerading as savants.
DRM
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