Redrum and Perle and Feith want to rewrite history...
This article was presented by Truthout
The Return of the Neocons
Thursday 19 June 2008
by: James Risen, The Washington Independent
... This anti-Pentagon historical narrative is straightforward and seems well established: Wolfowitz and Feith ran a neoconservative frat house while an arrogant, fiddling Rumsfeld roared against anyone who dared try to bring him the truth.
Neoconservatives - a loose association of pundits, politicians and analysts who put a right-wing spin on American exceptionalism and coupled that with an embrace of the doctrine of pre-emptive war - began pushing for regime change in Iraq in the 1990s. Wolfowitz and Feith brought this desire to oust Saddam Hussein with them when they joined the Bush administration...
And so, during the critical 18 months between the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were united at the forefront of the administration's march to war.
Five years later, 4,000 young Americans have died. No Pentagon leaders have been so thoroughly repudiated since the days of Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War.
When the Iraq war was young, and they were at the height of their power, few men in America seemed less concerned by or more disdainful of their public critics. The image created by a compilation of Rumsfeld's most famous quotations, words that will surely appear in the first paragraphs of his obituary - "stuff happens," "democracy is messy," "You go to war with the Army you have" - is of a man too busy and important to do anything other than casually mock the little people getting in his way...
Now, the Rumsfeld team is starting to fight back. Rumsfeld recently announced that he is writing his memoirs, while Feith's account, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism," came out this spring.
In a series of lengthy interviews over several weeks, Feith explicitly stated that his objective in writing his book was to start the process of altering the accepted history of the Iraq war, to adjust the Rumsfeld team's place in history. He wants to change the narrative - before it is too late...
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Douglas Feith says there COULDN'T have been any conspiracy to put Ahmed Chalabi in power because: "I'm putting out a bold challenge - I have gone through the documents, senior level Pentagon documents, and I can't find any documents supporting the extremely important conspiracy charge that we were plotting to anoint Chalabi"
Oh well, if there's nothing written down, it couldn't have happened.
(The fact that he used a very specific word to state his policy toward Jews inMein Kampf, the interminably self-serving and boring -- even for German philosophy -- tract written by his prison bitch, Rudolf Hess, and that word was vernischtung i.e., "annihilation," never seems to be remembered.)
The neocons point to Macnamara's self-serving and interminably lying piece of crap -- "Fog of War" -- as a model for correcting history.
How do I know it's a lying piece of crap?
When that book came out, there was one review that threw down on it, and that was by a Colonel who was teaching military history at West Point.
His claim to contradictory authority?
He was there.
He was an attache in those meetings and remembered quite clearly that anyone who contradicted Mac in any way ("Sir -- it wasn't Russian made -- it was a Claymore mine, one of ours.") was either thrown out of the meeting or saw Macnamara storm out, refusing to hear the facts he later insisted were unknowable -- "how could we have known when all the experts said it was so?"
Wow -- does that lame excuse resonate down the years. As well it should, since it was many of the same people who did it again under Bush Two
And of course, the proud tradition of various high commands who create military disasters is still in effect, i.e., blame the people who told you in advance it was a bad idea.
"Why didn't they speak up?" says Feith -- the angry premise is this -- "How could they let me commit the crime I wanted to commit when they knew it was wrong and doomed to failure?"
In other words, WE -- you, me, Scott McClellan -- we are THE DEVIL as in "THE DEVIL LET ME DO IT."
There's only one answer to that sort of thinking, and Texans know it well ... lynch law.
Our country has used it before.
Remember, the neocons' battle cry was "pre-emptive war"-- the same thing the Japanese used to attack Pearl Harbor. Same as the Nazi rationale for invading Poland. And as I recall, our answer was to hang Yamashita and sentence the top dogs of the Nazi effort to death.
Why shouldn't Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush and Feith and Perle and Rove and all the rest get the same treatment? They've committed the same exact types of crimes. The fact that they're penny-ante players in the game of Crimes Against Humanity doesn't change THEIR guilt.
So ok, maybe use a smaller, smoother rope.
There's a song by Ana Popovic on the one recording of hers that's been released in the USA, "Still Making History" -- it's the title song, and there are some lyrics in it that go:
---Ms Popovic is no Kumbaya singer -- this is one tough lady who grew up in war-zone Serbia while Milosovic was building up his resume as a war criminal. She is a hard-edged rocker and has apparently seen those hidden crimes committed, and then spun into tales of success and glory by the monsters who walk away.
We all knew, or should have, in advance that those of us who said "Jeezus Keerist -- read your history -- all you're doing is sentencing the ones who are patriotic enough to wear that uniform* to death and despair," were going to be blamed for the inevitable defeat. It's like Redrum and Cheney and all the rest thought Iraq was their Tinkerbell, and those of us who weren't clapping our hands were killing their dream.
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*Coincidentally, that uniform wasn't worn by any of those people who though going to was in Iraq was such a gooid idea.
posted by Saintperle at
2:07 PM
