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April 30, 2004
MORE EXAMPLES OF NEOCON GENIUS
It would be harder for me to pick on them if they'd quit saying and doing stupid stuff. Submitted for your approval:
Exhibit A: Paul Wolfowitz -- one of the architects of Bush's foreign policy and one of the most ardent hawks you'll ever find -- seems to be trying to minimize, at least in his own mind, the true costs of the Iraq war. Testifying at a hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee, Wolfowitz was asked how many Americans have died in Iraq. His answer:
"It's approximately 500, of which ... approximately 350 are combat deaths," he responded."
Um, Paulie?? It's actually 722, with 521 combat deaths. If you're going to construct a foreign policy that cavalierly sends Americans to their deaths, at least do them the courtesy of keeping an accurate count. The saddest thing is that with Wolfowitz, you just never know whether it was just a mistake or willful misinformation.
Exhibit B: Donald Rumsfeld -- another of the most dangerous men in the world -- says that he's surprised at the hostility American forces have been greeted with in Iraq.
"I guess if you asked me a year ago, I would have expected that the word 'occupation' and the negative aspects of that would not have been assigned to us to the extent it has been," Rumsfeld said.
Excuse me? Arab culture is famous for resenting outsiders; we were going to be dropping bombs on the country and disrupting the most basic elements of life there. And this utter freaking moron didn't expect that we'd be seen negatively?
Back in 1961, the CIA was convinced that Fidel Castro was evil and that the Cuban people would rise up and revolt against him at the first sign of American intervention. They told the president this, and based on that assessment Kennedy authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion. Of course, as we all know, it never happened; the Cuban people stayed home and the invasion force was stranded and abandoned on the beach. It marked the greatest American foreign policy failure of the Cold War to that point.
Forty years later, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocon cabal seem to have been similarly convinced -- similarly mistakenly -- that the evil nature of our opponent would overrule the fact that we were an occupying force in a foreign land, and that we'd be welcomed by the population... just like the CIA assured Kennedy the Cuban people would welcome the invasion force back in 1961.
The result of their tunnel vision is the greatest American foreign policy failure of the post-Cold War era.
