>I forwarded this to Christian Parenti - who, for those who don't know
>his work, spent about three or four months reporting in Iraq. and
>wrote an excellent book on the topic (The Freedom) - who comments:
>> I think that the US went it with very little in the
>> way of strategy and that the Shia pushed alot of what
>> happened, like the elections and the constitution...
>> but the Kurds (US tools) did put in the most sectarian
>> parts about three province veto, etc. de-bathification
>> was from Bremer, as far as I know, and was the result
>> of ideological zeal by a dude who knew fuck all about
>> iraq and was now acknowledged by all, left right and
>> center, to have been part of the US imperial suicide.
>
>> Yes it seems that divide and rule would have made
>> sense but this is meltdown and defeat....
These two points of view aren't necessarily inconsistent. If you go in without a proper plan, then the actual plan will be made by the state agents on the ground. However, the agents on the ground don't actually have the power to make things happen. In order to execute their low-level, reactive plans, they need the support of the authority back home. In order to get the authority back home to do what they want, they need there to be an immediate crisis. So they create a crisis in order to ensure that they are allocated the resources that they want. In this way, the original absence of a strategy turns into a de facto strategy of chaos. This is certainly what happened in Vietnam (sorry lads, you're getting yet more undigested Frank Snepp here), where the local pols (particularly Ambassador Martin) were constantly creating chaotic and dangerous situations in the belief that by doing so they were forcing the hand of Congress back home and freeing up more money and materiel that they otherwise wouldn't have got. As far as I can tell from Snepp's book, every pathological nightmare of the Public Choice School is basically true of the state apparatus of war, which is a bloody shame as this is exactly the point where most of the Public Choice School's doughtiest types lose all of their critical faculties (particularly, the allegedly intelligent Richard Posner, who IMO is right up there with Summers in the pantheon of people who everyone thinks is really clever, but nobody can actually tell you anything they've done or said which wasn't utterly moronic).
best dd
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