by Ari Shavit
WASHINGTON--At the conclusion of its second week, the war to
liberate Iraq wasn't looking good. Not even in Washington. The
assumption of a swift collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime had
itself collapsed. The presupposition that the Iraqi dictatorship
would crumble as soon as mighty America entered the country proved
unfounded. The Shi'ites didn't rise up, the Sunnis fought fiercely.
Iraqi guerrilla warfare found the American generals unprepared and
endangered their overextended supply lines. Nevertheless, 70 percent
of the American people continued to support the war; 60 percent
thought victory was certain; 74 percent expressed confidence in
President George W. Bush. . . .
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the
town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was
disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost
all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial
list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol,
Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends
and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas
are a major driving force of history. They believe that the right
political idea entails a fusion of morality and force, human rights
and grit. The philosophical underpinnings of the Washington
neoconservatives are the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Edmund
Burke. They also admire Winston Churchill and the policy pursued by
Ronald Reagan. They tend to read reality in terms of the failure of
the 1930s (Munich) versus the success of the 1980s (the fall of the
Berlin Wall). . . .
FULL TEXT
[Patrick J. Buchanan, "Whose War?," The American Conservative,
March 24, 2003]
Pankaj Mishra, "How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of
the first world war," theguardian.com, November 10, 2017
Aidan O'Brien, "The cover story is the 'War on Terror'. But don't be fooled: 'white
guy rule' has returned to the Sahara," counterpunch.org, November 10, 2017
