Why We Invariably Turn to the “Experts” Who Were Never Right When It Comes to Iraq

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/08-0


Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, John Bolton, Eliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, William Kristol, Frank Gaffney Jr.

We don’t get it. We really don’t. We may not, in military terms, know how to win any more, but as a society we don’t get losing either. We don’t recognize it, even when it’s staring us in the face, when nothing—and I mean nothing—works out as planned. Take the upcoming 10th anniversary of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as Exhibit A. You could describe what happened in that country as an unmitigated disaster—from the moment, in April 2003, U.S. troops first entered a Baghdad in flames and being looted (“stuff happens”) and were assigned to guard only the Interior Ministry (i.e. the secret police) and the Oil Ministry (well, you know what that is) to the moment in December 2011 when the last American combat unit slipped out of that land in the dead of the night (after lying to Iraqi colleagues about what they were doing).

As it happened, the country that we were going to garrison for a lifetime (to the thankful cheers of its inhabitants) while we imposed a Pax Americana on the rest of the region didn’t want us. The government we essentially installed chose Iran as an ally and business partner. The permanent bases we built to the tune of billions of dollars are now largely looted ghost towns. The reconstruction of the country that we promoted proved worse than farcical. And an outfit proudly carrying the al-Qaeda brand name, which did not exist in Iraq before our invasion, is now thriving in a still destabilized country. Consider that just the start of a much longer list.

For Americans, however, a single issue overwhelms all of the above, one so monumental that we can’t keep our minds off it or on much of anything else when it comes to Iraq. I’m talking, of course, about “the surge,” those five brigades of extra combat troops that, in 2006, a desperate president decided to send into an occupied country collapsing in a maelstrom of insurgency and sectarian civil war. Admittedly, General David Petraeus, who led that surge, would later experience a farcical disaster of his own and is in retirement after going “all in” with his biographer. Still, as we learned in the Senate hearings on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Pentagon chief, the question—the litmus test when it comes to Iraq—remains: Was the surge strategy he implemented a remarkable success or just a simple, straightforward success in essentially buying off the Sunni opposition and, for a period, giving the country a veneer of relative—extremely relative—calm? Was it responsible for allowing us to leave behind a shattered Iraq (and all of Washington’s shattered imperial dreams) with, as President Obama put it, our “heads held high”? Oh, and lest you think that only right-wing Republicans and the rest of the crew that once cheered us into Iraq and refused to face what was happening while we were there find the surge the ultimate measure of our stay, check out Tom Powers’s recent admiring portrait of the surge general in the New York Review of Books.

Here’s at least one explanation for our inability to look defeat in the face and recognize it for what it is: like the proverbial horseman who prefers not to change mounts in midstream, we have an aversion to changing experts in mid-disaster, even when those experts have batting averages for pure wrongness that should stagger the imagination. In fact, you could say that the more deeply, incontrovertibly, disastrously wrong you were about Iraq, the more likely the media was in the years after, on one disaster “anniversary” after another, to call on you for your opinion. At the fifth anniversary of the invasion, for example, the New York Times rounded up a range of "experts on military and foreign affairs" to look back. Six of them had been intimately involved in the catastrophe either as drumbeaters for the invasion, instigators of it, or facilitators of the occupation that followed. Somehow, that paper could not dig up a single expert who had actually opposed the invasion.

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. You forgot BOB WOODWARD

During an appearance on Larry King Live, he was asked by a telephone caller, "Suppose we go to war and go into Iraq and there are no weapons of mass destruction," Woodward responded "I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There's just too much there."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Woodward

[ananda]

2. I don't know about "we" ...

I did turn to experts, btw. They weren't very popular with the mainstream media and rightwing corporate powers that be, though.

I liked hearing from people like Hans Blix and those historians of the ME who actually understood Iraq and Saddam Hussein, who told us that Iraq and the USA would be much worse off as a result.

Of course the Bush-Cheney cronies, mercenaries, and political divisionists did very well. All of us 99ers are paying a very heavy price and will continue to do so. The Bush regime has long tentacles into our future.

[Bluenorthwest]

3. An ode to the experts....Only An Expert by Laurie Anderson

Now only an expert can deal with the problem
Because half the problem is seeing the problem
And only an expert can deal with the problem
Only an expert can deal with the problem

So if there's no expert dealing with the problem
It's really actually twice the problem

[xchrom]

4. love her. nt

[marmar]

5. The photo array at the top ought to be a collection of mugshots.

nt

[Fire Walk With Me]

6. But, but...only an expert can solve problems!

[Zen Democrat]

7. One of JFK's most important speeches he extolled against a "Pax Americana"

The speech at American University, summer of '63. It's why the military-industrialists hated him so. Just like they hate Obama now.

[sendero]

8. Who is this "we"?

I don't think there is a "we", there is the Main Stream Media who are just stenographers for the people running the show.

It's not just in the area of the Iraq war that pundits and seers with an appallingly pathetic track record are dutifully sought out for their opinion, economics and politics are other fields where you don't have to be right ever to have some "news"-monkey seeking your opinion and publishing it far and wide.