by Roland X, 9-29-03

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They gave us a plan. Really. It sure may not have seemed like a real plan, true. Slippery justifications, deceptions meant to equate Hussein with bin Laden, and "we don't need no plan B" chest-thumping certainly made it look like they were just barging into a nation to steal the oil, but Dubya actually explained something clearly for once:

Less than two weeks before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, Bush seemed eager to explain why this war would be different. "That's a great question," he said March 6 when asked if Iraq could turn into another Vietnam. "Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament. And in order to disarm, it would mean regime change. ... It's very clear what we intend to do. And our mission won't change."

Since then, the Iraqi regime has been ousted and its army disbanded, but U.S. troops remain as an occupation army in an increasingly hostile land with no timetable for getting out.

There are no weapons of mass destruction, meaning that we have nothing to disarm. Hussein is on the run, his sons are dead, and most of his top people are in custody. Though Bush's braggadocio was unjustified, the mission has he stated it has indeed been accomplished. The absence of Hussein's supposed WMDs is a horrid embarrassment, true, but the Administration's goals have been met. And yet, our courageous soldiers are still in Iraq, receiving rank disservice from privatized corporate support, desperately trying to bring order and peace to a nation where they don't know the language or the culture, and dying all too regularly. Why?! The answer is simple.

The regime change was never meant to turn Iraq over to its people. From the very beginning, it was their intention to be in Iraq indefinitely, as this article quoted on the PNAC site shows:

The idea then was not simply to get rid of a dangerously aggressive Imperial Japanese government, nor merely to deny the Japanese the capacity to launch another Pearl Harbor. It was to rebuild Japanese politics and society, roughly in the American image. American policy in Japan, as in Germany, was "nation-building" on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy. Almost six decades later there are still American troops on Japanese soil. Iraq may not be that different. Surrounded as it is by vulnerable friends such as Turkey, by Arab states of tenuous legitimacy, such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and by such worrisome nations as Iran and Syria, Iraq's success after Hussein's fall will be a vital American interest if ever there was one. If the United States goes into Iraq, it better be ready to stay there for as long as it takes. When President Bush makes it clear to our European allies that he understands this, at least some of them may breathe a little easier. And so should we.

Note: this article was written by Robert Kagan for the Washington Post, but Mr. Kagan is a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise us that the war plan was another lie. This one is different, though. The notion that we were only going to go in, eliminate a global threat, restore order and freedom, and go home, was the Mother Of All Lies. We were never meant to leave. While Bush played the heroic cowboy, reassuring America with his faux-honest "plain folks" demeanor, his neocon cabal was planning to make Iraq the world's largest military base. While Iraqis would have some autonomy (certainly more than they "enjoyed" under Hussein), any government that showed signs of being unfriendly to the many planned military bases would be subverted.

In their defense, it is becoming increasingly clear that the neocons honestly believed their rhetoric. This control would surely be an easy matter, they apparently reasoned, as the Iraqis would pave the streets with rose petals in gratitude to their heroic American liberators. Military bases? We freed them from Saddam! They'll give us all the military bases we want! American contractors? American know-how is famous all over the world, why would they want anything else? A say in the new Iraqi constitution? Why, certainly -- America is a beacon of freedom for the entire world!

Not any more.

I haven't heard of a single pundit outside the neocon community and its proxies agreeing with this assessment. There were many warnings, nearly all of them dire. In America, the left, the true conservatives on the right, and several agencies within the government disputed this rosy scenario. Throughout the world, from like points of opposition in Britain, from nearly the entire populace of Spain, from both of our neighbors, from France, from Germany, from Russia, from almost the entire world, the same arguments were repeated. They didn't know the culture. They didn't understand the history. They underestimated Arab nationalism and Islam's reach.

They had no idea what they were getting into, and they lied to us not only about the reasons, but about the intent. There was never an exit strategy because there was never supposed to be an exit. Aside from having Saddam on the run, it's the only part of their plan that has worked so far, and even that "success" has proven to be a political and diplomatic disaster.

All the lies, all the misdirection, all the arm twisting, every bit of it was aimed at conquering a nation and transforming it into a political and military launching pad. Instead, the sum of all their lies turned out to be an ever-deepening sand pit that threatens to swallow America's prestige and political might.

(/) Roland X http://rolandx.blogspot.com