Re: [Marxism] Obama aides

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mr. Hartal wrote:
>But the strategy-study Matt Gonzalez cites says it takes 24 months 
>to withdraw all combat troops.

You know something, I don't care if the strategy-study Matt Gonzalez 
cites says it will take 24 months. And I also don't care if 92 
percent of Iraqis backed the occupation as was the case in Panama. 
Revolutionary socialists oppose imperialist occupation of other 
nations. The "peace" Democrats don't see any particular principle 
involved in U.S. troops occupying other countries, as Samantha 
Power's support for NATO intervention in the Balkans would indicate. 
Here's my take on "peace" Democrats:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/06/14/no-end-in-sight/
Last Monday night I made the mistake of attending a press screening 
for "No End in Sight," a documentary about the war in Iraq. Expecting 
a hard-hitting denunciation of U.S. foreign policy, I was instead 
treated to 102 minutes of people like Richard Armitage, Samantha 
Power and George Packer explaining why things turned sour. All in 
all, I felt like I was watching the PBS News Hour but without even 
the token appearance of a leftist like Juan Cole.

The movie is just another example of the "what went wrong" mentality 
that occurs when an imperialist invasion fails to achieve its stated 
goals. After Vietnam proved to be unwinnable, "peace politicians" 
began to speechify about the "tragedy." If LBJ had been able to 
accomplish his goals, as he had in the Dominican Republic, there 
never would have been a peep out of them.

"No End in Sight" hardly goes into the criminality of the invasion, 
as do many inside-the-beltway studies like Thomas Ricks's "Fiasco." 
There is no hand-wringing over nonexistent WMD's or alleged ties 
between Iraq and al-Qaeda. This is not to speak of the film's utter 
refusal to even question American material interests in the region, 
including the desire to control oil. This obviously flows from the 
worldview of director Charles Ferguson, who has a PhD in political 
science from MIT and who went on to consult for the White House and 
the Department of Defense. He is now a member of the Council on 
Foreign Relations. This is not exactly the sort of person who will 
even entertain the idea that the U.S. does not have a right to impose 
its will on other peoples. His main interest is in figuring out why 
such a project did not work so as to help the ruling class figure out 
how to do it better next time.

Drawing upon the dubious insights of General Jay Garner, the head of 
Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), who was 
eventually replaced by the infamous Paul Bremer, the film argues that 
there were three fundamental mistakes:

1. The U.S. failed to pull together a puppet (my word obviously) 
government in a timely fashion.

2. It decided to purge the bureaucracy of all Baath party members.

3. It dissolved the Iraqi army.

If these mistakes hadn't occurred, things would be proceeding 
swimmingly. That at least is the impression that the rogue's gallery 
of interviewees intend to communicate. One of them is Colonel Paul 
Hughes, who recounts how he wanted to beat down George W. Bush's door 
to warn him about the consequences of dissolving the Iraqi army. One 
imagines that in Mr. Ferguson's insular little but powerful world, 
Paul Hughes plays the same role that Martin Luther King Jr. played in 
ours. Nowadays Hughes is involved with the United States Institute of 
Peace, an outfit that is run by Chester A. Crocker, who was Ronald 
Reagan's Undersecretary of State, a position that surely earned him 
the qualifications to promote world peace, as long as we understand 
this as the peace of the graveyard.

At least with Paul Hughes, there can be no confusion about what he 
stands for. He is careerist military bureaucrat who grieves now over 
the fact that Iraq does not resemble Jordan. But it is characters 
like Samantha Power and George Packer who nearly had me bolting from 
my seat. Powers and Packer made a career out of promoting 
"humanitarian interventions" from their roosts at Harvard University 
and the New Yorker Magazine respectively. Both were deeply involved 
in pushing for war in Yugoslavia and are mainly upset today because 
Bush was not as adroit as Clinton in bending the will of a foreign 
population to our aims. They see Bosnia and Kosovo as big success 
stories, even if it was accomplished through war crimes such as 
destroying passenger trains and the human beings within.

Obviously not recommended.


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