Gen. Peter Pace, Larry Craig's newest BFF, spoke to reporters on Friday, saying,
"One of the mistakes I made in my assumptions going in was that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi Army would welcome liberation, that the Iraqi Army, given the opportunity, would stand together for the Iraqi people and be available to them to help serve the new nation."
Everybody wants to be just like us, don't they, General? To listen to him talk now, you'd think the only research the general did prior to the invasion was talk to that unbelievable moron Bill Kristol, who famously said, "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
Actually, the fact of the matter is, even Pace's inane statement to the press is a convenient lie for administration lackeys to fall back on-"we had no idea." Apparently, even that's bullshit. Check this out, on tompaine.com, from February 2006:
With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.
The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney— to no avail— that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before the war, during it and in the aftermath, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the U.S. intelligence community’s chief Middle East analyst, from Wayne White, the State Department’s chief intelligence analyst on Iraq and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.
For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn’t even alarming: they just didn’t care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney’s shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous “Clean Break” paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : “The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq would “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.”
Such black neoconservative fantasies—which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will—have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
I became physically ill as I read this. It's very easy to think these guys were so stupid, so entrenched in their utopian fantasies of a US friendly, Democratic Middle East that they believed that as Richard Perle said, that in a year's time they would be naming the streets of Baghdad after George Bush. It's a lot harder to swallow when you realize that they knew what chaos and unspeakable violence they would likely unleash in their murderous pursuit of Saddam Hussein and they did it anyway. They didn't care. As much as I have dismissed conspiracy theories floating around in "Loose Change" and "The New Pearl Harbor"-not even George Bush could be so monstrous-reading the above means I will be looking at them with a more objective eye.
Apparently in the General's skewed vision of what's right, homosexual acts are immoral, but knowingly putting 25 million people in harm's way for the sake of a lie is A-OK. As is expected from anyone remotely connected to this administration, Peter Pace is simply telling a self-serving lie when he says he just didn't know. It's really sad when you decide that it's safer to just look stupid than to tell the truth.
