The Washington Post!
One of the reasons my live radio broadcasts were silenced
on WFAX was my outspoken exposure of the "misconduct" of the Neocon
Jews and their war against Iraq on behalf of Israel. In today's Washington Post Harold Meyerson says it more
accurately and more eloquently than I ever did!
Harold Meyerson
For Neocons, the Irony of Iraq
In the beginning, neoconservatism was a movement of onetime
liberals enraged at the wave of violence and disorder that overtook the cities
in the 1960s. Riots convulsed urban America in that stormy decade, crime rates
soared, student radicals seized campuses. How could anyone see all this, the
first generation of neocons inquired, and still remain a liberal?
For it was all the liberals' fault. Wafted along by their
vaporous good intentions, indifferent to any unintended consequences those
intentions might engender, wrapped up in their dizzy notions of the
perfectibility of humankind, the liberals (at least, as the neos Caricatured
them) crafted criminal codes devoid of punishment, welfare programs requiring
no work. In the world the liberals made, civic order took a back seat to
individual rights, and as order vanished, the urban middle clas3 vanished with
it, abandoning once-vibrant neighborhoods for the safety of the suburbs. A neoconservative,
the movement's founding father, Irving Kristol, famously observed, was a
liberal who'd been mugged by reality. While liberals dithered, neoconservatives
argued first and foremost for more cops.
Fast-forward four decades and we've come full circle. The
neocons have refocused their attention on foreign policy and, in championing
the Iraq war, have come to embody
everything they once mocked and despised in '60s liberals.
Bolsheviks in the cause of their vaporous intentions, so
bent on ignoring reality that they dismissed and suppressed all intelligence
that prophesied the bloody complexities of the post-Hussein landscape, they
conjured from nowhere and guaranteed the world an idealized postwar Iraq.
The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the
need for civic order. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, said
that the occupation would require many hundreds of thousands of troops to
establish and maintain the peace, he was publicly rebuked by Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's foremost, neocon, and quickly
put out to pasture. When the first U.S. official to take charge in
post-invasion-Iraq, Jay Garner, called for a massive effort to train Iraq's
police and restore order, he was summarily dismissed. When looting far more
widespread than anything the United States had ever known swept Iraq's cities
after Hussein's fall, Don Rumsfeld shrugged and said, "Stuff happens"
a two-word death sentence for the possibility of a livable Iraq.
And now, just as middle-class Americans fled the cities in
the wake of urban disorder, so middle-class Iraqis are fleeing, too not just
the cities but the nation. In a signally important and devastating dispatch
from Baghdad that ran in last Friday's New York Times, correspondent Sabrina
Tavernise reports that fully 7 percent of the country's population, and an
estimated quarter of the nation's middle class, has been issued passports in
the past 10 months alone. Tavernise documents the sectarian savagery that is directed
at the world of Iraqi professionals the murders in their offices, their
neighborhood stores, their children's schools, their homes and that has
already turned a number of Baghdad's once-thriving upscale neighborhoods into
ghost towns.
Slaughter is the order of the day, and the police are
nowhere to be found. "I have no protection from my government,"
Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni who has decided to emigrate, told
Tavernise. "Anyone can come into my house, take me, kill me, and throw me
into the trash."
Irving Kristol initiated neoconservatism at least partly in
revulsion at the disorder of John Lindsay's New York. Now his son William
Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and the single leading proponent (going
back to the mid-1990s) of invading Iraq, has helped convert neoconservatism
into a source of a disorder infinitely more violent than anything that once
disquieted his dad.
To do so, he and his fellow war proponents ignored all
credible information on the actual Iraq and promised an Eden more improbable
than anything that '60s liberals ever imagined. "There's been a certain
amount of pop sociology in America," he told National Public Radio
listeners in the war's opening weeks, "that the Shia can't get along with
the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic
fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all," he
continued. "Iraq's always been very secular."
He wasn't entirely wrong. Iraqi professionals were
disproportionately secular. Now they are packing up their secularism and taking
it to other lands. The war, and the failure to establish order that led to the
barbarism that's driving Iraqis away, can't be laid solely on the neocons'
doorstep, of course. These second-generation neos needed a trio of arrogant,
onetime CEOs Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld to actualize their vision. But
actualize it they did, and the ideologues whose, forebears once argued that the
drugged-out Bronx was a monument to liberal folly have now made blood-drenched
and depopulating Baghdad the monument to their own neocon obsessions.
mepersonh@washpost.com
