Devastating Analysis of Times Iraq War Promotion

I always read the Sunday NY Times Week in Review, in particular the Op-Ed page (now expanded to four pages!).  This week, there were two egregious features on Iraq:  An amazingly patronizing and blame-shifting piece by reporter John Burns and a purported symposium of views on Iraq on the occasion of the invasion's fifth anniversary. Anticipating the latter, I looked forward to a diversity of views reflecting on the past five years. Instead, there was an array of apologies, recriminations, excuses, and half-truths by neo-cons like Richard Perle, Danielle Pletka and Fred Kagan, a bizarre piece by Paul Bremer, a sorta mea culpa, but stay-the-course piece by Kenneth Pollack.

This presentation is brilliantly eviscerated by David Bromwich in a must-read entry in the current Huffington Post:  

Bromwich begins with the Burns piece, noting that Burns throughout credits the "good intentions" of the war, but says that these intentions were "betrayed by the troops," e.g., at Abu Ghraib -- a blatant whitewash of the proven policies from the highest levels that were implemented there.

Burns concludes that our "good intentions" went wrong because the Iraqis were "traumatized" by Saddam's long rule:

Trauma and traumatized are weapons of the last resort in the analytic arsenal; they go off when you run out of facts and surmises. These words are among the indefeasible descriptors about which historians rightly say: "With that kind of license, you can bag any game." Iraqis must have been traumatized, declares Burns. What else but a previous trauma could account for the fact that they disliked the invaders of their country and deplored the effects of a catastrophic war?

Bromwich's brilliantly understated sarcasm continues with his analysis of the nine genius/apologists/scam artists who made up the "symposium."

Here's how he deals with surge-meister Fred Kagan:

The co-author of the surge, Frederick Kagan, is summoned by the Times to praise himself. He gives thanks to "our soldiers and marines" who "use their firepower to the full" while minimizing "collateral damage." We are now, says Kagan, fighting a war of "skill and compassion," and he repeats the word compassion, as he also repeats "precision": our soldiers have been taught to mount "high-precision operations" using only "precision-guided weapons." (This is in many ways a schoolboy essay.)

Summing up the nine, Bromwich scathingly states the truth:

We must "foster appreciation of the building blocks of civil society." But that will take time. So, it might seem that the choice, for Iraq, is to be free as we tried to let them be, or unfree in their own way as people lacking the gene are fated to be. Yet that is not what Pletka and the resident fellows at the AEI have in mind. Having failed the genetic test, Iraq must now submit to be unfree under American supervision, while Americans climb the long trail (so much steeper than we thought) toward making them free like us.

Let's repeat that last part:

Iraq must now submit to be unfree under American supervision, while Americans climb the long trail (so much steeper than we thought) toward making them free like us.

A brilliant precis of the mentality of those who got us in and want us to stay there for years and years.

Read the whole piece!