On Nov 21, 2006, at 5:31 PM, www.leninology. blogspot.com wrote:
> Other point is, the American government isn't stupid: they know
> full well
> what happens when you destroy the central institutions of the state,
We could debate this point forever, but as far as I and many better- informed people would tell you, yes the Bush admin was indeed very stupid and really had no fucking idea what they were getting into. They put 25-year-olds in charge of privatization, to take one random example. They wouldn't listen to anyone who knew anything about Iraq, because anyone who knew anything about Iraq would have told them that things would turn out pretty much as they did. Policy was made by a small cabal of arrogant provincials. Quite a few of them really believe you don't need a state when you let the market run free. If a cynical master like Kissinger were running things, I'd agree with this perspective, but he wasn't. Dick Cheney was.
You might be allergic to the anti-Bushism on the European left, but really, these guys are as clueless as they're said to be. As Anatol Lieven put in on my radio show in the run-up to the invasion, the Bush crowd wasn't even fit to run a kebab stand in Baghdad, let alone the entire country.
Doug