Now, yes I am incredulous on the following statement :
American officials have been repeatedly stunned and frequently thwarted in the past three years by the extraordinary power of Muslim clerics over Iraqi society.
Absurd, of course. But, has the Bush Administration been incompetent in its conduct of the Iraq gambit ?
I was one of the ones - among at least a few - who over a year ago predicted the possible outbreak of sectarian hostilities leading to civil war in Iraq.
But as much as I dislike Vice President Cheney, I don't assume incompetence on his part. I'm not the only one.
Enter : The Cheney Plan
Wrote Dave Mason
last January, '05 :
Bush is throwing the war on purpose.
It is a standard tactic in warfare to try to divide your enemy and exploit divisions among their ranks. The more time, energy, ammunition and lives they expend killing each other, the easier it becomes to conquer them, or so states the theory. Provoking a civil war is Bush's hidden strategy in Iraq.....
I really wish that I didn't have to believe this, but consider the alternatives. Either Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Perle, Kristol, Kagan et alia are, each and every one of them, stupendously-ignorant wingnut morons, entirely under the sway of Christian dominionism and entirely unaware of Arab, world, and military history.... Failing to give the neoconservatives credit for both: long-term planning, and knowledge of strategy & history, both: flies in the face of the evidence, and assists them in their goals. Of COURSE they want you to think they're stupid - that perception can mask your understanding of the true savagery of their intent.
So here we are. I posted on this too, last year, immediately following Dave mason's piecee ( and expanding the explanation to encompass the aims of the US Christian right )
Yes, some in the Bush Administration NeoCon faction may have intended this very outcome : a full scale Iraqi civil war would cause American casualties to escalate and so lend compelling support to the partitioning of Iraq....
Indeed, a tripartite partitioning of Iraq, with a Kurdish state and the annexation of parts of Iraq by Jordan and Kuwait ( which presumeably would grab the richest Iraqi oil fields ) was reported by STRATFOR and other sources to have been a pre-invasion scenario that had been under consideration by Dick Cheney - into 3 parts under the so-called "Hashemite Plan"..... Now, back on March 31, 2003, I didn't have sufficient background.... I know far more now and feel capable of sketching this overall outline :
Prior to the invasion, the Bush Adm. Neocons had their own unique geopolitical agenda which concerned the following overall objectives
- establishment of US bases in Iraq and Northwest Asia - from which to fill the power vacuum in the region left following the collapse of the USSR - to control and safeguard oil production and also project American power into Asia, in anticipation of coming conflicts in that theatre. That rightly should be termed the "Grand Chessboard" strategy, in honor of Zbigniew Brzezinski's book of that name, that was really "The Great Game" of the British and Russian empires updated for the needs of a 21st Century US Global hegemony,
- A corollary pro-Isaeli agenda of neutralizing Iraq as a threat to Israel ( and from the Israel perspective enlisting the US army as what some have termed a "Gurkha" force in Iraq ).
- Profit !
Now, the first goal was overt, the second two not. But there was another, rumored, wrinkle to the plot -
The "Cheney Plan" for Iraq [ "Chop it up and give away the pieces" ] : "...STRATFOR claims "high level" sources told "them that one of the leading long-term strategies being considered by US war planners is one that will DIVIDE Iraq into three separate regions.Under this plan Iraq would cease to exist.....this is not the only plan under consideration, he said they pointed to Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, "both considered the most hawkish of Bush administration officials," as the architects of the "Hashemite" plan."....."
The new government's attempts to establish control over all of Iraq may well lead to a civil war between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish ethnic groups, with US troops caught in the middle. " " [ emphasis mine ]
In other words, a civil war was considered, pre-invasion, to be a possible and even a probable outcome.
So, we can see a progression of events ( especially given the inadequate troops levels provided for the invasion - that all but guaranteed anarchy, looting, and the widespread destruction of infrastructure - the decomissioning of the Iraq regular army, and all of the other improbably egregious strategic post invasion blunders ) that fit orthodox expert opinions on the outcome of post-invasion occupation - a slow degeneration into anarchy, quagmire, and civil strife - which was in fact accelerated by the seemingly improbable blunders of a Bush Administration that seemed all too expert at campaigning and domestic politics and yet also utterly incompetent at envisioning probably scenarios in Iraq and even of listening to expert opinion from trained specialists, on Iraq and the Mideast region, working for the CIA and the DOD - who generally predicted that things would not turn out so swimmingly as predicted in the administration's rosy pre-invasion pollyannish scenarios of a magical blossoming of a new democracy on the Tigris.
Now, it should be noted that the invasion and occupation filled a wide array of domestic and private objectives for the Bush Administration such as : 1) financial rewards for the military industrial complex, the oil industry, and private corporations connected to the Bush Administration such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Brown and Root, and so on, 2) consuming federal spending and thus serving to "starve" that domestic government spending so hated by the US right ( with the charge led by Grover Norquist ), 3) Reinforcing a spirit, especially on the US right, of militaristic nationalism and 4) Distraction from job loss and lackluster economic growth 5) last but not least, the electoral boost George W. Bush received from the "rally round the flag" effect.
Those would have been most of the objectives - both acknowledged and secret - of the secular elements of the Bush Adminstration. Was insurgency, and civil war or civil strife envisioned as a bankable likelihood following a US invasion and occupation of Iraq ? That cannot be proven, but it fits the progression of events.