Darth Cheney also was an eager recipient of Chalabi's disinformation. It was Cheney, in the fall of 2002, who complained: "We're getting ready to go to war, and we're nickel-and-diming the INC at a time when they're providing us with unique intelligence on Iraqi WMD." [The New Republic, December 1, 2003]
Unfortunately, as Americans learned after the invasion, every piece of intelligence supplied by Chalabi's INC informants proved to be bogus. Did Chalabi care? No. When asked whether he felt any remorse about his role in duping Americans into an invasion of Iraq, Chalabi responded: "No. We are in Baghdad now." [Ibid, p, 389] Given that Chalabi was sponsored by the neocons, one is compelled to ask: Was this stupidity or was it treason?
Consequently, given the eagerness of America's neoconservatives to spill American military blood, perhaps it's time to reconsider the words of Stanley Fish: "Much of the world has been opposed to the Iraq war from its beginning, and now after four years 70 percent of Americans share the world's opinion. Some who deplore the war believe that those who got us into it and cheered it on did so, at least in part, out of a desire to improve Israel's position in the Middle East. Those who hold this view (and of course there are other analyses of the war's origins) fear that the same people - with names like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams, Kristol, Kagan, Krauthhammer, Wurmser, [the convicted felon] Libby and Lieberman - are pushing for a strike against Iran, arguably a greater threat to Israel than Iraq ever was." [Fish, New York Times online on March 4, 2007]
A glaring omission from Fish's list, of course, is the name of Norman Podhoretz, a Jew who fervently hopes that President Bush will bomb Iran. Yet, Professor Fish wrote his inflammatory words precisely to condemn their implicit anti-Semitism. And properly so!
Keep in mind that the majority of America's Jews opposed the invasion of Iraq. Consequently, it's America's neoconservatives, including it Jewish members, who deserve America's condemnation, not America's Jews. Thus, rather than give anti-Semitic believers of the old "Protocols" any further reason to nurture such nonsense about Jews, I suggest that the American public, especially America's men and women in uniform, focus their attention instead on the willingness of America's neocons (both Jewish and Gentile) to establish a new "Protocol" - the "Protocol of the Elders of American Neoconservatism."
Under this new "Protocol," American neoconservatives are permitted to urge the spilling of American military blood for neoconservative objectives - including world domination -- but without having to fight, kill or die for those objectives themselves.
Were America's soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to push back against such cowardly warmongering, they just might save themselves from the worst excesses of this "Protocol." For example, when William Kristol recently wrote about progressives, "They Don't Really Support the Troops," our troops should keep in mind that his real objective was to mask his own criminal complicity - and the complicity of America's neocons -- in the deaths of more than 3,600 American soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
For, as readers of Thomas E. Ricks' book, Fiasco already know, by clamoring for war, it was the neocons who failed to support the troops. How so? Because many of America's senior military leaders (both active and retired) opposed the very invasion of Iraq that the neocons begged for.
In fact, the neocons have fostered the spilling of American military blood in Iraq in at least three different ways. First, through their drumbeat for the unprovoked, illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq, a country that had no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to al Qeada and no initial connection to Bush's so-called war on terrorism. (Iraq became connected only after Bush's blunder drew jihaidsts like flies to that God-forsaken country.)
Second, through their ideologically inspired negligence, the neocons helped to create the debacle that our troops now face in Iraq. The negligence of neocon Douglas Feith deserves particular scorn. He simply blew off his responsibilities to plan for the post-invasion occupation. Consider the words of a Bush administration official: "Feith ought to be drawn, quartered and hung…He's a sonofabich who agitated for war in Iraq, but once the decision is made to do it, he disengages. It was clear there were problems across the board - with electricity, with de-Baathification, with translators, with training the Iraqi police - and he just had nothing to do with it. I'm furious about it, still." [Ricks, pp. 167-68]
Even worse than Feith's negligence, was the ideologically inspired negligence of Paul Wolfowitz. Remember Wolfowitz's asinine assertion: "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine." [George Packer, The Assassins' Gate, pp. 114-15]
Thus, thanks, in part, to Wolfowitz, the U.S. military went into Iraq with insufficient troop strength, and thus proved unable to prevent either the widespread looting or the subsequent emergence of the insurgency, which soon blossomed into a civil war. As a consequence, more American military blood was spilled (and continues to be spilled) in Iraq than was necessary.
Finally, nothing better establishes the failure of the neocons to support the troops than the opposition of their views to the sobering assessments made by America's military leaders.
First, consider the words about the "surge" recently uttered by William Kristol: "[T]hese soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war." [Weekly Standard , 30 July 2007]
Putting aside his "just cause" canard, simply contrast Kristol's disingenuous words with the assessment made more than three years ago -- on May 12, 2004 -- by Bush's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers: "[T]here is no way to militarily win in Iraq."
Better yet, contrast Kristol's words with the assessment made by Bush's Joint Chiefs' nominee, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, just three days ago: [T]here is no purely military solution in Iraq."
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