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well, i haven't repeated this for a while, but i think its accurate.
i think the motivation for this debacle follow directly from the neocon interpretation of the first gulf war. it's pretty clear from the project for a new american century statement of purpose, from the 1998 letter these bozos sent to clinton advocating an attack on iraq. the necon interpretation is simple enough: they understood clinton in particular as a problem because he favored multi-lateral agreements as the basis for globalizing capitalism. for the neocons, this was insufficiently nationalist. the first gulf war was, for them, the theater of american national humiliation at the hands of the united nations--the "proof" is in the delusion that there was a "job to be finished" and that this job was toppling saddam hussein--and that the johnwayne amuricans would have "finished the job" had they not been shanked by the un. no matter that this is in historical terms somewhere between revisionism and hallucination--the first gulf war is for the neocons a symbolic conflict pitting two types of globalizing capitalist order--one embodied by the un, built along the multi-lateral model (at this point anyway)--the other a model emphasizing (assymterical) bilateral agreements as the basis for the new capitalist order with the american military apparatus wedged onto the top of it as the lone superpower, or military hegemon. the arguments advanced by teh bush people to legitimate this debacle were, as wolfowitz said a couple years ago, expedients--the action wasn't about any of it--they were all rationales for launching a war that the pnac had been advocating for a long time. so none of it was serious, none of it was true or had to be true.
apparently, the oil was a secondary motivation--it'd be a way to make the debacle pay for itself. i have never accepted the argument that oil was THE motivation. i dont think it irrelevant, but think it down the list a bit in terms of priorities. more a perk to be had by the heroic americans, an expression of undying gratitude or some such nonsense.
although this continues to boggle my mind, the idea was a short war, a quick victory, a bunch of photo ops and a fait accompli insofar as the emergent global capitalist order was concerned. if the political adversary is understood not to have been saddam hussein at any point, but rather an entire emerging order symbolized in neocon fantasyland by the un, you can explain pretty easily how the right treated the un--from powell's ridiculous, shabby presentation through the the amazing obfuscation of the reasons why only the resolution legitimating the war did not pass the security council (freedom fries anyone?) the tragic aspect of this--which is also ludicrous and would be funny had it not already cost so many lives--is that there was no plan b.
there was no plan b.
everything that has happened in and around iraq seems to me to have followed in a straight line from this.
if the interpretation is right, then it is not in any way surprising that the actual rationales floated for this debacle were horseshit.
the only surprise is that there is any surprise.
you can see that the whole of plan a, such as it was, was carried out too--the surreal "mission accomplished" photo op, complete with cowboy george in a flight suit and a knotted bandana over the penile region actually makes sense this way. it was supposed to be serious. it was supposed to be the coup de grace, the crowning of the colossal fuck you to the united nations, to multilateralism, to a globalization that does not leave a place for good old fashioned reactionary nationalism and all its foul correlates---why without nationalism, it is hard to mobilize racism to sell a fucking administration--but more broadly, as the right will find out soon enough on a scale that goes well beyond what they have already found out, without this illusion of "the nation" conservatives have nothing to say. nothing to say at all.
so far as i can tell, then, even the people who supported this misbegotten fiasco in iraq were duped. they don't have and will never have the actual arguments for the invasion given to them. not from the bush administration anyway. they wouldnt have sold the war, those arguments. they are transparently delusional--were from the outset---were in 2003--certainly are now--some backwater reworking of kissinger-style realpolitik lay behind it, along with some idiotic faith that amurica is somehow "gods country" and that therefore this god character will make everything hunky dory, so there need be no plan b or even a coherent plan a.
so it is pretty obvious that folk like ace, who appear to have believed in the bush people, to have assumed that they were operating in good faith, were used. that cant be fun.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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