The President's Real Goal in Iraq (BARF ALERT)

The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.

The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions.

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

(Long editorial, click on the link for the remainder of this biased, baseless tripe...

Where do I start? I thought about dissecting this line by line and sending a letter to the editor of the AJC, but I doubt that they would publish it, if only because they published one from me a week or so ago. Additionally, the AJC has shown that their "Opinion - letters from readers" page is not the opinion of their readers but the filtered opinion of their bedwetting leftist-dominated editorial board. This strikes me as pointedly obvious given that a majority of Americans, particularly we southerners, support going after Iraq while a majority of the letters from readers in the AJC oppose it.

There are many, many flawed concepts in this editorial, the most striking of which is his claim that the administration wants to become the "world's policeman." When this new administration came into power, the Left was in a hand-wringing frenzy over how we would become isolationists and ignore our "responsibilities" in the world as the "world's only superpower". Yet during the dark Clinton-Gore years, where did Clinton choose to utilize the US military but in feel-good areas that had little or nothing to do with US National Security, such as the Balkans and Haiti? Talk about acting as the world's beat cop...

The author also chooses to take a very myopic view of Bush's national security team. Because of the fact that Wolfowitz, et al, wrote a policy review in 2000 that they are still following, he concludes that they had this plan for an "empire" that the war on terrorism now gives them the opportunity to take advantage of as some sort of a ruse. The fact of the matter is that unlike the entire Left (including the pathetic pretender-hawk Joe Lieberman) these men and women understood the state of the world and how it works before 9/11/01 and were already prepared to deal with it, unlike the previous administration who used the military to either genuinely distract public attention from domestic scandals or for self-congratulatory "we did the rahht thang in Kosovo" sound bites (biting the lip and pausing at the appropriate moment).

Mr Bookman cites the standard line of the Democrats once again, that there is not enough evidence to go into Iraq, but he is yet another sad and lost leftist partisan who does not get the underlying issue from the Clinton years: character DOES count. Mr Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have stated time and time again that there is indeed more evidence that they cannot disclose because that very disclosure would give away the methods of intelligence gathering. When Mr Bush looks in the camera and tells me that we have to do this, I know that he knows more than I know and that given that he is an honest man I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Back when Willy was president we all knew that he was a pathological liar, so even if he did earnestly want to get bin Laden when he lobbed all of those missiles at empty tents and an aspirin factory, we would never believe him. This is exactly why you have to elect honest people, sometimes you are going to be forced to give them the benefit of the doubt. You need to be able to trust that person.

Then the author goes on to talk of containment, showing that like the other myrmidons on the Left he is stuck in the late 60s. Back in 1970 or 1980, if a nuclear weapon had detonated in an American city we would know that it was either the USSR or the ChiComs... and based upon the purity of the fallout we could determine who it was and respond in kind; this contained these countries and kept them from committing such an atrocity. But Mr Bookman and his obsolete ideological soul-mates still do not see how the world has changed. The very concept of containment/deterrence only works if such an attack could reasonably be traced back to the perpetrator; if one of these little totalitarian regimes could use a proxy group of terrorists to attack us with such a weapon while feeling that it would be exceedingly difficult to trace it back to them, they would do it in a New York nanosecond. The world has changed markedly and these people just do not get it, though they seemed to get it for a month or two last fall, before they sensed a political edge... what wonderful patriots.

Then, following the James Carvile Talking Points, he goes on to the mantra of "allies" and their lack of support. I feel that we really have two allies in this world that actually have the power to be worthwhile military allies: the UK and Israel. The Germans, French, Canadians, etc, are so caught up in their America-hating inferiority complex that they cannot bring themselves to support anything that we want to do. These little European girly-men would not even act on the Balkan situation in their own back yard until the US committed to playing a role. As such, their opinions mean NOTHING. When we want to talk of fine wines or nice historic architecture we may give them a call... Let's call it like it is: France, Germany, and Russia do not want us to go into Iraq for two very obvious reasons: 1) They sold a lot of the equipment to Saddam that he is using to create WMDs, and we would find significant evidence of that in postbellum Iraq, and 2) Saddam owes them money, which they clearly hold more dear than preventing the slaughter of human beings.

In summation, this is a profoundly pathetic and hollow editorial that can be dissected and discredited by anyone who is not on the far Left side of the IQ Bell Curve. Unfortunately, this discounts the vast majority of the Democrat Party support base as well as the AJC editorial board.

The AJC may be a leftist publication, especially regarding their editorial point of view. They may slant their analysis to the left, but there is a story here. Some excerpts from the Chicago Tribune:

===
Vice President Dick Cheney, the prophet of pre-emption, has become the most influential American strategist since George F. Kennan, the father of the doctrine of containment.

Kennan's doctrine, laid out in a 1947 magazine article and adopted by the Truman administration, prevailed for a half century and won the Cold War. Cheney's ideas, contained laid out in a still-classified Pentagon paper from 1992, have just been endorsed as official policy by President Bush and will guide America's role in the world for at least part of the 21st Century.

.......

The new American doctrine was issued Sept. 20 by the White House. It is a 31-page document titled The National Security Strategy.

Its main points are:

- That America's military might remain "beyond challenge," presumably forever, so overwhelming that no nation, friend or foe, has any "hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."

- Deterrence and containment, the keys to the previous strategy, are out. "Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work," it says. "Some enemies cannot be deterred."

- Pre-emptive war--a first-strike policy of hitting anyone who might be thinking of hitting us--is in. The new key is "anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. . . . The U.S. will, if necessary, act preemptively."

- Current international law approves pre-emptive attacks "on the existence of an imminent threat." But sometimes threats will be more vague, so "we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries."

- Our Cold War enemies were hostile but rational and not suicidal. The new doctrine demonizes America's new enemies as "more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people" and says they "reject basic human values."

- Alliances and international organizations have their uses, but the new emphasis is on more temporary "coalitions," presumably similar to the grouping of Central Asian states now helping the U.S. in Afghanistan.
===

There is a link to the actually strategy document in pdf form: Go here for actual pdf file

Ya'll can read this and draw your own conclusions now.

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