pottery barn hawks and chaos hawks
Mon Sep 10, 2007 at 09:35:01 AM PDT
Check out this article by Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly. After neatly describing the war hawks' morphing first into "Pottery Barn hawks" and then into their current incarnation as "chaos hawks," he proceeds to challenge the "chaos hawk" prediction of catastrophic regional war if we leave Iraq. Read the whole thing. It's not very long.
THE CHAOS HAWKS....In the beginning were the War Hawks, and much did they counsel the powerful to do battle against the evildoer Saddam. Then came the war, and the looting, and the Heritage Foundation hordes, and the hawks lamented exceeding loud and many soon repented of their ways. Yea, verily, they presently transformed themselves into Pottery Barn Hawks, eager to fix the disaster they had helped create and thus redeem themselves in the eyes of the faithful. In the fullness of time, though, the disaster ripened and flowered and became impossible of resolution, and the hawks despaired. Success had become unachievable, yea unto their own generation and the generation to come after them. In short, life sucked.
So what's a Pottery Barn hawk to do? The answer, lately, is: become a Chaos Hawk. First, admit that Iraq is hopeless, thus demonstrating that you're not completely out to lunch.
<snip>
Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven bigger than the entire continent of Europe.
Needless to say, this is nonsense. Israel has fought war after war in the Middle East. Result: no regional conflagration. Iran and Iraq fought one of the bloodiest wars of the second half the 20th century. Result: no regional conflagration. The Soviets fought in Afghanistan and then withdrew. No regional conflagration. The U.S. fought the Gulf War and then left. No regional conflagration. Algeria fought an internal civil war for a decade. No regional conflagration.
It shouldn't need to be pointed out that these chaos hawks are for the most part the same clowns who have been wrong about everything up until this point. They have no credibility.
Drum lays out a more realistic outcome that, while tragic, is unlikely to be less tragic if we stay:
But Iraq is already fighting a civil war, and that civil war will continue whether we stay or go. If we go it will likely become more intense, but also shorter lived. The eventual result, however, will almost certainly be the same: a de facto independent Kurdistan in the north and a Shiite theocracy in the south. The rest of the Middle East will, as usual, watch events unfold without doing much of anything about them, and will accept the inevitable results. The U.S., for its part, will remain in the north to protect Kurdistan, in the east in Afghanistan, in the west in the Mediterranean, and in the south in its bases in the Gulf. We'll hardly be absent from the region.
Drum fails to mention, however, the real reason for staying in Iraq, which is simply to stay in Iraq. We went in there in the first place to control the oil, and the people who took us in can't bring themselves to give that up. All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion. It's grossly immoral to use violence to control another country's resources, and it's similarly immoral to use violence to continue an occupation for the same reason. Throughout history, whenever a country commits such aggression, they come up with rationalizations to avoid looking soberly at the evil in the mirror. (This is of course standard human psychology.) Such imperial rationalizations are often variants of the classic "white man's burden" schtick, of which I would include the "Pottery Barn hawks," the "chaos hawks," and the part of the original invasion marketing regarding bringing freedom and democracy.
As for George Bush, I consider him a puppet in all of this. He is a delusional and insecure ignoramus, easily manipulated through flattery, a mere tool in the service of Cheney and the neo-con cabal. Their agenda predates the Bush presidency and was clearly spelled out in their various PNAC publications: invade Iraq and install a permanent military presence to control the oil thereby thwarting any challenges to our hegemony from China or Europe. That's why we went in. That's why we'll stay until either the oil runs out or real democracy actually functions and our government responds to the will of the American people.
cross-posted at miasmo.com
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