The neo-cons

It's a testament to our neutered media that the neo-con hawks (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Crystal, Wolfowitz, McCain) aren't being publicly ridiculed for yet again suggesting that the way to solve problems in the Middle East is through the use of military force.

America went into Iraq under false pretences. A shockingly ill-informed and ignorant post invasion dismantling of the institutions of law and order along a largely sectarian divide unleashed pent-up resentment and led to a conflagration that was contained largely by a US troop presence. The promoting of, and support for, a polarizing Shiite prime minister exacerbated that divide.

Now the very people who made these decision, who created the mess, are advocating getting back into the fray; are telling us we should be taking sides in a civil war between two religious groups, one who had suffered oppression under the old regime, the other suffering under the new. Ask anyone from Britain how well 20 years of peace keeping in Northern Ireland went.

In April 1994, Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defence under President George H. W. Bush, explained that going onto Baghdad during Desert Storm would have been a terrible idea:

"Do you think US or UN forces should have moved into Baghdad?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone, there wouldn't' have been anyone one else with us, it would have been a US occupation of Iraq, none of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government in Iraq you could easily see pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for 8 years. In the north you've got the Kurds; if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey, its a quagmire, if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. "

Twelve years later he did exactly what he had been cautioning against. And history has shown anyone willing to look how right he was 20 years ago.

What explains this extraordinary willingness to ignore the facts? Either, the neo-cons have such short memories that decisions taken before 2008 aren't remembered; or they are too feeble-minded to understand what happened. Neither is plausible; these are smart and capable individuals. Which leaves only the possibility that they are advocating this for purely political gain: hoping either that if President Obama does not intervene militarily that accusations of inaction, indecision, and 'leading from behind' will help them in the 2014 and 2016 elections; or if he does, it will go so badly (as it must) that the failure can be blamed on Obama and the democrats again helping them in the next two election cycles.    

Unless President Obama (and/or Hillary Clinton - though she has been interestingly quiet on the subject) can make the case for not intervening simple enough for the Twitterverse, the electoral choice puts them between a rock and a hard place; but one (the neo-con) option involves further inflaming the situation, reinforcing the moral hazard problem we created, without any likelihood that the death toll will be any less.