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June 10, 2006
Andrew Bacevich has an interesting article in the London Review of Books entitled Why read Clausewitz when Shock and Awe can make a clean sweep of things?The article is a review of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor.
Bacevich confirms the position of this weblog that toppling Saddam (for Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) was the first phase of what was expected to be a long campaign to restore US pre-eminence, and that Iraq could serve as a secure operating base or jumping-off point for subsequent US efforts to extend the Pax Americana across the broader Middle East, a project expected to last decades.This would begin to redraw the political map of the region.
The strategy was that ‘The president would preside, the vice-president would guide, and the defense secretary would implement’ --- with Wolfowitz and a handful of others lending the enterprise some semblance of intellectual coherence.
Bacevich goes on to say that this project of unleashing American might abroad involved a radical reconfiguration of power relationships at home.This involved reducing the power of the Congress and the Supreme Court to circumscribe presidential freedom of action and waging a bureaucratic battle royal to marginalise the State Department, to wrest control of intelligence analysis away from the CIA and reform the Pentagon.
Bacevich says that Cheney and Rumsfeld have some wins:
Congress at present hardly amounts to more than a nuisance. Its chief function is simply to appropriate the ever more spectacular sums of money that the war on terror requires and to rubber stamp increases in the national debt.
The CIA has been weakened, the State Department is aligned with Cheney and Rumsfeld under Rice, and the US military has been transformed. What of the Supreme Court? Bacevich says:
The Supreme Court historically has shown little inclination to encroach on presidential turf in time of war. Any prospect of the court confronting this president was seemingly nipped in the bud by the fortuitous retirement of one justice followed by the death of another. In appointing John Roberts and Samuel Alito, Bush elevated to the court two jurists with track records of giving the executive branch a wide berth on matters relating to national security.
It is Iraq that has proved to be the stumbling block.
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Gary,Bacevich enforces my own thoughts on the Iraq fiasco, and Pax Americana. I have read this type of analysis by the likes of Fisk,Pilger etc, and it is nothing new. For mine what has happened in Iraq was as predicted by "the left" and I find it totally amazing that a lot of what can be best described by me as right wing cracker jacks, still buy the W.M.D. line.
What Bacevich really tells me is more about the American people than Bush and his coterie of dangerous nut jobs. That the American people again not withstanding the alleged influence of Kathleen Harris,voted for this MORON twice beggars belief.
I don't really think the American people have realised what they have done by unleashing this idiot on the world. There is going to be pay back for all the innocent lives that have been shed over this phoney war on terror .Is all I can hope for is when it comes, and it will, it effects the Gung Ho wing nuts, that are not only happy about what has happened in Iraq and Afganistan, but would like to march on Moscow, Bejing, stopping for a little lunch in Pyongyang and not my family and I.
What was it that one of Reagans sychophants General Alexander Haigh said? The real enemy is in China and that for mine is where all this is leading.
Phill.