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Friday, March 04, 2011

In Iraq war retrospect, the Bushcons/neocons “should have their heads examined,” and the “isolationists” were the only ones with a modicum of sanity

From:
Robert Gates, Neo-Isolationist?

(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

“(A)ny future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. MacArthur so delicately put it,” Robert Gates has just told the cadets at West Point.

America would be nuts, Gates is saying, to fight a new land war like the two he inherited.

It follows that the “neo-isolationists” who opposed invading Iraq and a “long war” in Afghanistan were right, in Gates’ eyes. Quite an admission from a defense secretary who presided over the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan.

Yet, do not the balance sheets of both wars bear Gates out?

Nearly 10 years after 9/11, at a cost of $100 billion a year, we are still bleeding in Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, however, is long gone, but embedded today in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

Eight years after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, the butcher’s bill is in: 4,400 U.S. dead, 37,000 wounded, 100,000 Iraqi dead, half a million widows and orphans, half of Iraq’s Christian population in exile, the other half terrorized and a Shia Iraq drifting toward Tehran.

For what? Al-Qaida was not in Iraq in 2003, but it is there now.
Pushed by neoconservatives to institute a no-fly zone over Libya, Gates retorted: “Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya.” To sustain it would require at least two aircraft carriers. Why is Libya’s civil war our problem?

Gates is now singing in tune with his country.

Yet his position implies a new foreign policy.

For if we are not going to fight another land war in Asia, what are we doing with 28,000 troops in Korea, many up on the DMZ, as Pyongyang rants about hurling a “sea of fire” against the South?

Why not withdraw the U.S. troops, let South Koreans take their place and sell Seoul the weapons to defend itself, while restricting our role, should the North attack, to air and naval support?

Why should U.S. troops fight a second Korean War, 60 years after the first and 20 years after the end of the Cold War? Was not the first Korean War the war that soured MacArthur on any future land war in Asia?

What vital interest of ours is at risk on that Asian peninsula?...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

The Iraq war never was about the general American interest, but rather about war-profiteering, maintaining the Keynesian military-industrial complex "national security" welfare scam/wealth transfer, taking out one of Israel's enemies, and neocon/neolib "creative destruction" Globalism.

"Isolationist" always was an epithet thrown out by elite elements who profited from the scam, and the general Keynesian swindle, to suppress dissent.

That they were able to get away with it all so easily just goes to show the extent to which the mainstream mass media is in their pocket.

America is no longer being governed to serve the general interest, but rather to serve multiple particularistic special interests, and our elites and Ruling Class in no way represent the common interest.

In this sense, we can barely even define ourselves as a nation anymore, but rather a mere assortment of conspiring grifters and confidence men, and their victims.

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