Neocons voice their Idealism, yet again…
Writing by abuhatem on Friday, 23 of November , 2007 at 12:42 pm
Neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammar echoes neocon over-optimism again in today’s Washington Post. Krauthammar, just as he did before the run up to war in Iraq (and right after) is over optimistic that we have won the war. The idea is, that this means their theory is working:
A war seemingly lost, now winnable. The violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. Political allegiances have been radically reversed. The revival of ordinary life in many cities is palpable. Something important is happening.
Krauthammar plays off pessimists as “in denial,” and then proceeds to spin every negative development in a positive favor, for in his words, there were a lot of “Sure, but…” lines in the column:
Sure, there is no oil law. But…
Sure, the de-Baathification law has not been modified. But…
Read the column for more of this nonsense. Yes, the surge is working, but three months of success are nothing close to the idealistic picture that Krauthammar describes. Where is the everyday life of the Iraqi in this picture? The civil society? Institutions? Oh yeah, I forgot, sure there are suicide bombings and slaughterings of civilians everyday but we’re winning so they will soon go away.
For a much more balanced analysis see Trudy Rubin, veteran Middle East journalist, in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer where she tears apart the Krauthammar article:
“This change has been dramatic, but we have to be real cautious in evaluating it and reacting to it,” says a senior State Department official. “That which emerged quickly could recede quickly.”
And yet there is room for a smidgen of hope. (In the Middle East, it never pays to go overboard with optimism.) Where does such hope lie?
It lies in the fact that Iraqis themselves took the first steps to quash the violence even before the surge started.
Thomas Friedman also has a more balanced article on Iraq, which appeared in Wednesday’s New York Times:
Michael Gordon, The Times’s top military expert, whose history of the Iraq war, “Cobra II,†is one of the best books on the subject, said the phrase circulating in the military lately to describe the situation evolving in Iraq is “accommodation without reconciliation.†The various parties basically accept the new imbalance of power — Shiites on top, but allowing the Kurds and Sunnis to have a share — and the political struggle continues with lower levels of violence.
In the end nobody is denying that violence has declined greatly, but saying “the war is over,” reminds me a lot of someone on an aircraft carrier who said “mission accomplished.”
Category: International Relations
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