Wednesday, May 24, 2006
The Neocons - Failure has not made them humble
The disaster that is Iraq * In Afghanistan, More "Collateral damage"
Paul Wolfowitz moved away to a cushy job as chief of the World Bank but most of the other architects of the failed policy about Iraq are still around. And despite all the evidence to the contrary, the president and his aides continue to try to justify taking the nation to war. They go through contortions to make their point but humility is a word they don't know the meaning of. Harold Meyerson writes in the Post: "The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the need for civic order. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, said that the occupation would require many hundreds of thousands of troops to establish and maintain the peace, he was publicly rebuked by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's foremost neocon, and quickly put out to pasture. When the first U.S. official to take charge in post-invasion-Iraq, Jay Garner, called for a massive effort to train Iraq's police and restore order, he was summarily dismissed. When looting far more widespread than anything the United States had ever known swept Iraq's cities after Hussein's fall, Don Rumsfeld shrugged and said, "Stuff happens" -- a two-word death sentence for the possibility of a livable Iraq."
- And now, just as middle-class Americans fled the cities in the wake of urban disorder, so middle-class Iraqis are fleeing, too -- not just the cities but the nation. In a signally important and devastating dispatch from Baghdad that ran in last Friday's New York Times, correspondent Sabrina Tavernise reports that fully 7 percent of the country's population, and an estimated quarter of the nation's middle class, has been issued passports in the past 10 months alone. Tavernise documents the sectarian savagery that is directed at the world of Iraqi professionals -- the murders in their offices, their neighborhood stores, their children's schools, their homes -- and that has already turned a number of Baghdad's once-thriving upscale neighborhoods into ghost towns.
- Slaughter is the order of the day, and the police are nowhere to be found. "I have no protection from my government," Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni who has decided to emigrate, told Tavernise. "Anyone can come into my house, take me, kill me, and throw me into the trash."
Deaths of Innocent Civilians
Claims and counterclaims about dead Afghans are not going to bring them back. Neither will demand for investigation by President Karzai going to put a stop to such incidents. "Afghan President Hamid Karzai is to summon the head of US-led coalition forces for a "full explanation" of a raid officials say killed 16 civilians. "
The numbers of civilian casualties keep climbing both in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is quite clear that we don't give a damn. So what if a few civilians die in our military actions against the evil doers. Women and children among the dead....too bad. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. President Bush is carrying on a mission to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan and they ought to be happy. Instead, the Iraqis and Afghans are complaining about dead civilians. Ungrateful lot.
The numbers of civilian casualties keep climbing both in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is quite clear that we don't give a damn. So what if a few civilians die in our military actions against the evil doers. Women and children among the dead....too bad. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. President Bush is carrying on a mission to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan and they ought to be happy. Instead, the Iraqis and Afghans are complaining about dead civilians. Ungrateful lot.
