"British generals critical of the Iraq war should spell out precisely what went wrong, how and when"

[ProSense]

Tell us more, top brass

British generals critical of the Iraq war should spell out precisely what went wrong, how and when

Robert Fox
Monday September 3, 2007
The Guardian

Criticisms at the weekend by Generals Mike Jackson and Tim Cross of US policies for post-Saddam Iraq are not remarkable in themselves - it's clear enough that the postwar planning was "intellectually bankrupt" and "fatally flawed", and was from the very first. The remarkable factor is the status of these two men - they were in on the British bit of the Iraq operation at the beginning, yet have only now chosen to speak out.

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Much the same might be said of Vice-President Dick Cheney, often seen as the eminence gris in this. Take a look at a clip from 1994 riding high at YouTube, in which a younger Cheney explains why the US forces had not gone to Baghdad to topple Saddam in 1991. His reasons are a perfect catalogue of indictment for his subsequent policies: America would have had to act alone, causing more casualties, the Arabs would have opposed, Iraq might have broken up and divided, and this would encourage the neighbours - Saudi, Syrian, Turk and Iranian - to more mischief.

But it wasn't just Don and Dick behind all this. Proconsul Bremer, egged on by the felon Ahmed Chalabi, broke the machine beyond repair by disbanding the army, purging Ba'athists, and so wrecking the civil service. Who was behind him? Bound by omerta, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Karl Rove all knew, but it was the other guy who decided. In the end the responsibility lies with the man theoretically in charge, George Bush, who fell for the neocon fantasy of a new America to lead a new world in a new century.

For the British generals there are now a series of questions that they may be unwilling or unable to answer. When did they realise all these terrible things about the malfunctioning senior ally? Did they mention it to the prime minister? If so, what was his response? According to the Alastair Campbell diary version of events, not much was discussed - Tony decided to go into Iraq with the Americans as far back as spring 2002. Gen Jackson and his fellow chiefs asked about the legality, and that was it. As I recall, the service chiefs were keen to go in at the time, and didn't like it when some of us suggested that this was no Northern Ireland: it was no simple case of soft berets and cups of tea.

Today the risk is that Bush, egged on by militants like Fred Kagan, Jack Keane and John Bolton, will go ahead and seek to solve one, or even two, wars by starting another - via a tactical strike on revolutionary guard units in Iran. Nothing allies, the UN or even Congress can do would stop them, because, in Bolton's phrase about Gen Jackson, "they do not understand the full picture". And for picture, read vision, for the last group of irreducibles are revealing the millenarian side of the neocon movement - theirs is a higher vision of the finality of things than the rest of us.

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Second British general bashes US strategy in Iraq

[xchrom]

1. details would only help their cause -- but it may be a case of where to begin.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. "they do not understand the full picture"

The "full picture" is, of course, the necons belief that they have a duty to work for total US world domination and their right to use whatever means they deem necessary to achieve their objective.

Feeling confident that all plans were on track for moving aggressively in the world, the Bush Administration in September of 2002 published the "National Security Strategy of the United States of America." The official policy of the U.S. government, as proudly proclaimed in this major document, is virtually identical to the policy proposals in the various white papers of the Project for the New American Century and others like it over the past decade.

Chief among them are: 1) the policy of "pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks a country may be amassing too much power and/or could provide some sort of competition in the "benevolent hegemony" region, it can be attacked, without provocation. (A later corollary would rethink the country's atomic policy: nuclear weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political/economic ends; so-called "mini-nukes" could be employed in these regional wars.) 2) international treaties and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals. 3) The new policies "will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia."

In short, the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S., admiringly, as a New Rome, an empire with its foreign legions (and threat of "shock&awe" attacks, including with nuclear weapons) keeping the outlying colonies, and potential competitors, in line. Those who aren't fully in accord with these goals better get out of the way; "you're either with us or against us."

http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm