Blumenthal: Domino Diplomacy

[kskiska]

Condi Rice and Co. are using the conflict in Lebanon as a proxy war with Iran that will somehow rescue the U.S. from failure in Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Once again the Bush administration is floating on a wave of euphoria. Israel's offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon has liberated anew the utopian strain of neoconservatism that had been traduced by the Iraqi sectarian civil war. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has propelled herself forward as chief cheerleader. "What we're seeing here," she said, "are the birth pangs of a new Middle East." At every press conference she repeats the phrase "a new Middle East" as though its incantation were magical. Her jaunt to the region is intended to lend the appearance of diplomacy in order to forestall it.

In Rome Wednesday, a proposal by European and Arab nations for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon was scuttled by U.S. opposition. As explained to me by several senior State Department officials, Rice is entranced by a new "domino" theory: Israel's attacks will demolish Hezbollah; the Lebanese will blame Hezbollah and destroy its influence; and the backlash will extend to the Palestinians' Hamas, which will collapse. From the administration's point of view, the Israel-Lebanon conflict is a proxy war with Iran (and Syria) that will inexplicably help turn around Iraq. "We will prevail," Rice says nearly as often as she refers to a "new Middle East."

(snip)

To the Bush administration the conflagration has appeared as a deus ex machina to rescue it from the Iraq quagmire. That this is patently absurd does not dawn on those who remain in thrall to the same pattern of thought that imagined the invaders of Iraq would be greeted with flowers in the streets of Baghdad. Denial is the basis of repetition. New and irrefutable revelations of the administration's disastrous consequences are brushed off like lint.

This week has also seen the publication of "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," by Thomas E. Ricks, the military correspondent of the Washington Post, a book devastating in its factual deconstruction. The Iraqi invasion, he writes, was "based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history." The policy making at the Pentagon was a "black hole," with the Army adamantly opposed to "the optimism," and resistance by the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to disinformation linking Iraq to Sept. 11 dismissed. ("How the hell did a war on Iraq become part of the war on terrorism?" demanded one officer summarizing the general reaction of the Joint Chiefs' staff.) Orders that "smacked of politicized military leadership" suppressed internal debate; commanders who raised questions were cashiered. After the absence of a plan for postwar Iraq, blunder upon blunder fostered the insurgency. These errors combined with "ignorance of long-held precepts of counter-insurgency warfare," leading to a "descent into abuse" and torture.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/07/27/middle_east/

[bemildred]

1. Tooth fairy diplomacy, as in we believe in the tooth fairy. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Slightly edited, but commercial free, version in The Guardian

The neocon resurgence

[pscot]

3. "Birth pangs", but of what

These lines from Yeats are often quoted, but reading them now is enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

"mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
a blood dimmed tide...

..twenty centuries of stony sleep
vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle
and what rough beast, its hour come round at last
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"