From my viewpoint in the UK it is more difficult to say what the deep-seated motivations of the neo-cons was. However I will put forward a hypothesis: Iraq was contained, and therefore militarily weak, and it was a tempting target. It was tempting to see an easy invasion of Iraq as leading to the solution of a number of other problems: oil prices, Israel/Palestine, where to station US troops in the middle east etc. Except that the many of the assumptions have turned out to be unvalid!

Or he’s a 19th century colonialist who hasn’t got the joke of 20th century American imperialism (that you don’t need to own the land/cow as long as you can extract the labour production/milk)?

We have been through much of this at the level of evidence over and over. People are still trying to pretend that Powell was unaware he was lying to the UN in his famous speech. Outsiders, with far less access to intelligence information, were able to point to tons of misstatements. This was the guy who tried to get us on the right path. We have guys who were in the room, on the public record saying that they settled on a weapons charge not because it held water, but because it was the charge behind which everybody would most readily line up. Why do we need to pretend the result was unforseen by those in charge, even in some special oh-so-sociologocal way?

Our elected leaders are elected so that they are responsible. When they weasle around trying to shape policy in ways that leaves bureaucrats to blame (think of CIA torture tapes), they should be removed not for the policy, but for the effort before the fact to duck responsibility.

So what, exactly, did/does he want? I figured it was selling rights over Iraqi oil, a massive, permanent military establishment on Iran’s and Turkey’s borders, a weak client state, on a shorter leash, dressed up in democratic drag, and enough instability to justify permanent high levels of spending on military contractors, diverting money from the US govt to his own/cronies’ pockets. How far are we from that? Is it acceptable to postpone ownership of Iraqi oil, as long as nobody else has it?

Shorter JHW: Oh fergawdzakes, don’t you people have anything better to do with your time?

What do you think? Plausible or not?

The great political strategist of our time is Ariel “Facts on the Ground” Sharon. You screw things up so badly that they can’t be fixed, and then you take advantage of the mess to put your own plan into effect, and if it wasn’t actually legal in the first place, what difference does it make?

Though I think that the Bush team really did expect the subjugation of Iraq to be much easier than it was. They were already planning the invasion of Syria or Iran (or maybe Venezuela or Cuba), but they had to postpone everything. But the Iraq war was still a success, in that it closed off a lot of options that the Bush-Cheney team didn’t want to see.

Dsquared’s statement needs revision.

“Give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration,

It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it),

It wasn’t in some important way completely f—-ed up during the execution plausibly could have been regarded as an effort to attain its publicly stated goal.

Since we don’t know what their goals are/were, particularly Cheney, how can we determine if the results are f’d up or not? Personally I think Cheney has had an incredibly successful administration from his point of view; what he has accomplished makes me sick but he has accomplished more of it than anyone since Teddy Roosevelt.

Cranky

Ralph Hitchens, I want to point out that you are utterly and completely wrong about this.

You are quoting another of those things that everybody knows which is not true. Everybody knows this because the mass media repeated it a lot. But there is no evidence whatsoever for it.

The consensus you describe did not exist. No such thing. It is a consensus that was invented for media consumption, and the “intelligence community” was not willing to stand up and tell the truth when the lie was created.

I repeat, there was no such consensus. Cheney was unable to get the conclusions he wanted from the “intelligence community” and had to invent his own intelligence community to get the consensus he wanted.

And now people tell this lie all the time. It’s disgusting. Please stop.