[lbo-talk] Civil war in Iraq: the pause that refreshes

Colin Brace cb at lim.nl
Sat Feb 25 10:51:50 PST 2006


On 2/24/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> This is utterly stupid. Chaos in Iraq does not serve any US purpose
> right now - either the long-term needs of the empire or the
> short-term electoral needs of the GOP, which requires getting out
> ASAP (in a way consistent with the needs of the empire, of course).
> Yesterday you said they needed weapons contracts; today you say it's
> a pretext for getting out in 72 hours. Iraq blew up in the face of
> the neocons. Things haven't gone their way. They're fucked. Iraq is
> fucked. Why peddle this nonsense?

See what Robert Dreyfuss wrote yesterday at TomPaine.com:

[...]

For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn't even alarming: they just didn't care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to John Bolton's arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.

In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq's] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."

[...]

full: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/24/on_the_brink_in_iraq.php

--

Colin Brace

Amsterdam



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