A Strongman Scorned
Former Iraqi PM hops on the anti-Bush bandwagon:
“Yes, Bush’s policies failed utterly,” said Allawi, describing the U.S. administration that once backed him. “Utter failure. Failure of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, including fighting terrorism and economic policy.”
“His insistence on names like ‘democracy’ and ‘open elections’, without giving attention to political stability, was a big mistake. It cast shadows on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt, and I believe this will be remembered in history as President Bush’s policy,” he said.
A lot of truth to this, though of course Allawi shouldn’t be taken too seriously. His view was that being a cozy “pro-American” Iraqi leader ought to entitle him to being installed as permanent (”political stability”) strong man of Iraq at the tip of American bayonets. Bush tried it Allawi’s way for a while and his recognition that it wasn’t going to work out counts, in my view, as a non-error of the occupation regime. Indeed, quite the reverse. The smart pay would have been to seize advantage of Iraqi’s early 2005 elections, and the Iraqi public’s clear rejection at the polls of the Bush-Allawi vision for Iraq, to set a timeline for withdrawal way back then before the great civil war and ethnic cleansing of 2006 and 2007.
24 Responses to “A Strongman Scorned”
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January 3rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Had they followed your plans, Matt, we would have never brought unto the world our chosen begotten military strategy, The SURGE!! (YOU WILL ADMIT THE SURGE IS WORKING), which created democracy everywhere and proved that the liberals were America / troop-hating cowards and that all the anti-war people were wrong and they would have created the Khmer Rouge all over again like Noam Chomsky did and as long as you have a cool ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy (involving lots of payoffs of local militants), wars and occupations are awesome and we’re totally ready to do it again the next time the hawks want to.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Can we have some Vicky Iseman blogging? Now that Yglesias is mentioned in the complaint against NYT (page 21): http://libn.com/files/2008/12/iseman-complaint.pdf
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
So Matt’s strategy was to leave and precipitate a civil war? Because that’s how it would have played. The stated reason for not leaving was to prevent a descent into civil war. Which civil war didn’t come about. Say what you will, in the vulgar calculus of newspaper headlines, staying worked.
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“Can we have some Vicky Iseman blogging? Now that Yglesias is mentioned in the complaint against NYT”
A pair of goat fuckers…
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:34 pm
“Had they followed your plans, Matt, we would have never brought unto the world our chosen begotten military strategy, The SURGE!! (YOU WILL ADMIT THE SURGE IS WORKING), which created democracy everywhere and proved that the liberals were America / troop-hating cowards and that all the anti-war people were wrong and they would have created the Khmer Rouge all over again like Noam Chomsky did and as long as you have a cool ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy (involving lots of payoffs of local militants), wars and occupations are awesome and we’re totally ready to do it again the next time the hawks want to.”
Withdrawal in 2005 really would have been kinda stupid.
I think it takes someone who irresponsibly advocated for the invasion in the first place like Yglesias to irresponsibly advocate for withdrawal in 2005.
It’s hard to be wrong on both the hawkish and dovish sides in the same war, but Matthew is up to the challenge.
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Tell me the concrete advantage the US obtained from staying in Iraq after 2005. I see none. I can certainly list the costs.
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Yeah, our staying during that period of time totally prevented ethnic cleansing. I mean, if we left, there could have been violence!
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:48 pm
No, Petey, and for your information, I didn’t advocate for the war in the first place. In fact, I wasn’t in favor of Gulf War 1 as the preferred method of ending the Kuwait occupation, either, which obviously means I hate America and loved Saddam and etc. etc. etc.
This bullsh*t rewriting of the ethnic cleansing that actually took place as the miraculous SURGE was indeed of great benefit to the counterinsurgency propagandists. I don’t give a sh*t what the New Consensus holds about the great benevolence the continued occupation wrought. Sorry.
Petey, you’re such a hollow little prick because you can’t just argue against something, you have to proceed with the absolute assumption that your opponent is somehow morally inferior to you, because you’re the most proletarian Democrat to ever have existed. So if you’re going to disagree with somebody, don’t hide behind Matt’s trust fundyness or his previous idiotic support for the war based on authoritarian reasoning — disagree with me then.
January 3rd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
“So if you’re going to disagree with somebody, don’t hide behind Matt’s trust fundyness or his previous idiotic support for the war based on authoritarian reasoning — disagree with me then.”
But it’s no fun disagreeing with you, El Cid. You generally have pretty good politics.
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