The Peace Weenies Were Right

[proud2BlibKansan]

By Dean Baker
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Monday 21 May 2007

Last week I was struck to see a well-respected centrist foreign policy analyst discuss President Bush's "surge" as a serious policy for bringing stability to Iraq. This sight was striking, because at this point it is very difficult to imagine the surge as a serious policy. It seems evident that the surge is a desperate gambit by a president who does not want to acknowledge the failure of his invasion, and instead is willing to see the deaths of thousands more US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

The analyst's comments were disturbing because they seemed to be yet another example of an expert bending an analysis to accommodate political power. If the surge is a ridiculous military strategy, then it should not cease to become ridiculous just because the president of the United States has implemented it.

Of course, this is exactly the story of the Iraq war. Before the war, it was possible to know that there was no serious evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or involvement with the September 11 attacks. It was also possible to know that an invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a disaster for the United States and Iraq. But our foreign policy experts generally treated President Bush's allegations and war plans as completely reasonable.

If you wanted to hear serious discussion of these issues, you would have had to turn to the "peace weenies" (the term that serious Washington types apply to people who protest wars). The peace weenies may not have been foreign policy experts, but they were smart enough to recognize a politician who was not telling the truth. Perhaps the most disturbing part of this story is that even after we all know that the invasion was a disaster and the tales of WMDs were lies, the "experts" are still bending their analysis to accommodate those in power, and the media are still largely ignoring the dissenting voices.

more . . .
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052107R.shtml