[Vision2020] Iraq & Big News: PNAC Website Suspended!

[Ted Moffett]

Sunil et. al.

Secret plan?

Many of the details regarding long term US plans in Iraq in this article are
old news, though this exact "deal" may be an attempt to enshrine the plans
for a long term "occupation" into a more definite form.

I've been saying for years that the US will be occupying Iraq 50 years from
now... John McCain pushes the occupation potentially out to 100 years.

Any president in power who pushes for a major pull out from Iraq will have
to face the possibility of Iran gaining even more influence over Iraq, a
rather problematic foreign policy outcome that will discourage pulling out.
Saddam was an enemy of Iran, and kept Iranian influence away.  This was of
course part of the reason we gave Saddam military aid during the Iraq/Iran
war.

The US overthrow of Saddam empowered Iran, a nation that was probably more
of a long term threat to US interests than Iraq.  It was expected the US
could, after invading Iraq, somehow bring about regime change in Iran.  This
point was made clearly in military think tank analysis of US foreign policy
aims in regards to the Middle East, in articles presented by the Project for
a New American Century, infamous neo-con think tank. The fact the Iraq "war"
(it is now not a war but an occupation) had been such a disaster, in terms
of bringing a coherent stable democracy to Iraq, has impeded the long term
goals of regime change in Iran, a more important goal than bringing down
Saddam.

I just discovered the PNAC website was "suspended" on May 20, 2008.  This is
perhaps an expression of the utter failure of the neo-con agenda, now viewed
perhaps as a major political burden for the Republican party!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
------------------------------
Consider John Grey's (from the London School of Economics) analysis.
The Iraq invasion was perhaps Utopian, as Grey argues, an expression of the
Utopian idealism of "global market capitalism:"

http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/213/features/10975/paradise_lost.html

>From URL above:

Instead, the right followed Fukuyama by envisaging global market capitalism
as an unstoppable force of nature and panacea. "The characteristics which
had been features of communist thinking came about on the right – the
militant progressivism, indifference to the casualties of progress, and the
belief that the whole world was moving towards some single model and that it
should be accelerated by force," says Gray.
--------------------------

The attempt to bring democracy to Iraq was utopian, Gray believes, because
even with better planning it would still have failed. "The Kurds would still
have broken away. There would still have been a conflict between the Sunni,
who had been ruling the country, and the Shia – and a fairly strong Islamist
force emerging through the Shia."

------------------

Gray thinks war should be only a last resort for self-defence. "The Second
World War was justified. But war shouldn't be used as an instrument for
improving the human condition. That's where I differ from the theories of
pre-emptive war and revolution from the neoconservative right, which to me
exhibits the same kind of thinking as communism did."

He conjectures that the invasion of Iraq sounded the death knell for secular
utopianism. "Iraq practically precludes another large-scale experiment along
those lines. No one now, except a few post-Trotskyite neoconservatives in
bunkers, talks about overturning all the regimes in the Middle East and
replacing them with democracy."

------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 6/5/08, Sunil Ramalingam <sunilramalingam at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.truthout.org/article/revealed-secret-plan-keep-iraq-under-us-control
>
> When do we come out and say it's a colony?
>
> Sunil
>
>
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