All Things Neocon

[laststeamtrain]

All Things Neocon

Posted by Jeff Huber

Despite the public relations campaign that has so many folks convinced the surge in Iraq was a success, the country is still a zoo. It has been almost three years since the surge strategy was announced and David Petraeus was installed as commander in Iraq. As Professor and retired Army officer Andrew Bacevich puts it, Iraq is “now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a ‘success’ and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around.”

Explosions in central Baghdad on Sunday killed at least 25 people and wounded 40. Gen. Ray Odierno now in charge of the war in Iraq, says he may not be able to stick to the withdrawal timeline because of the increasing violence, and he thinks the insurgency may go on in that country for another five, ten or 15 years. Political reconciliation, the objective of the surge, has not taken place. The Iraqis can’t even pass election laws. The government and security forces are corrupt and incompetent. Our $700 million embassy in Baghdad has “considerable construction deficiencies” according to the State Department’s Inspector General’s Office.

Ain’t nothing going on right in Iraq.

As complex as things are in Iraq, they’re simple as pie compared to how things are in Afghanistan. It’s difficult to say what President Obama will decide regarding future troop deployments there. The media blitz underway by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his allies to pressure Obama into a major escalation may be too much for Obama to stand up to politically. If we double or triple the numbers of troops we have in Afghanistan, we’ll be in a more inextricable situation than the one we have in Iraq.

Stan McChrystal’s flying-circus plan to conduct a “classic” counterinsurgency in Afghanistan will never work. Regardless of the results of the runoff election, Afghanistan’s government will remain more crooked than Iraq’s. The closest thing Afghanistan has to a legitimate government is the Taliban, and we’re not going to defeat them. They live there. They have nowhere else to go. We, on the other hand, do have a place to go: home to the States.

<snip>

The neoconservatives and the Pentagon were beside themselves when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down? How would they justify their budgets? The neocons came up with a plan to turn the Middle East into a mini-Cold War, something they could keep going for another fifty years. Iran plays the role of East Germany, a low level threat that justifies keeping conventional forces in the region (well, “justifies” in the minds of the warmongery). Neocon tank thinkers would like to go back to the big-Cold War too, or something close to it.

<more>

http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/10/all-things-neocon.html