Gene Lyons: Inventing a New Metaphor in Iraq

[Stoic]

Gene Lyons: Inventing a New Metaphor in Iraq

"...To President Bush and the visionaries who sold him and the nation on "preemptive" war, everything was melodramatically simple. Saddam Hussein was a wicked tyrant whose removal would bring tranquility to the Middle East. Because Saddam was (and is), in fact, a murderous gangster, arguing against the war required counting past two, a degree of sophistication deemed decadent and unpatriotic.

Writing recently in the American Prospect, Jason Vest quoted "a very senior national security official" earnestly telling him before the war that "Americans would be welcomed in Iraq, and not with a fleeting shower of goodwill but with a 'deluge' of 'rose water and flowers' that would last in perpetuity." Such statements were almost as common before the war as warnings about Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction."

With relative ease, Iraq would be turned into an Arab Switzerland. Best of all, a veritable gusher of Iraqi petrodollars produced by the entrepreneurial skills of returning Iraqi exiles would pay for it. Vest had asked the unnamed official, a man with no military experience, what he thought of a cautionary report from the U.S. Army War College.

Entitled "Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario,"it emphasized the need for careful pre-invasion planning it said the Bush administration, in its ideological auto-intoxication, hadn't undertaken. "Without an overwhelming effort to prepare for occupation," it concluded "the US may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."

The official smugly debunked the Army's warnings. He was particularly dismissive of Army chief-of-staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, as "bullshit from a Clintonite enamored of using the army for peacekeeping and nation building and not winning wars." Shinseki was forced into retirement after angering Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld by telling a congressional committee that hundreds of thousands of American troops would be needed to to occupy Iraq for the forseeable future, perhaps as long as a decade. Other naysayers, reports Col. David Hackworth in his syndicated column, are being purged by "Rummy's" civilian ideologues--most of whom have never heard a shot fired in anger..."