Friday, February 02, 2007

Even Everything They've Said Has Turned Out To Be Wrong, Neoconservatives Are Still Clueless

It baffles me to see that, despite the utter chaos that has developed in Iraq, neoconservatives are still incorrigibly retarded in analyzing the situation.

Take Charles Krauthammer's lamentation, for example. Having acknowledged that sectarian strife exists on a full-scale level, Krauthammer lays the blame solely on the Iraqis, ignoring that L. Paul Bremer threw out over 50,000 low- and middle-level Baathist party bureaucrats and dissolved the Iraqi army, which left hundreds of thousands armed and unemployed. That pissed off a lot of people.

When you take jobs away from people and fill that vacuum with foreigners (i.e. private contractors), those now unemployed are going to be angry, hungry, and desperate, resulting in bad outcomes, especially if they are armed. Desperate people resort to hope, a concept that religion thrives on, and thus they lean toward their community leaders. People just like Moqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr has blamed the American occupation but has also sought vengeance against the Sunni minority. Conversely, the Sunni minority feels villified, ignored, and seeks to attack Shiites.

Yes, these feelings have been fueled for hundreds of years (much like Catholics and Protestants had violently brutalized each other throughout history), but the catalyst was that the new American occupation fired thousands of Iraqi government officials, disbanded the Iraqi army, and never fully filled the vacuum. The jobs that were replaced were filled by either the US military or private contractors. Iraqis had little say in the early stages of reconstruction.

Sorry, Mr. Krauthammer. You were wrong then and you are wrong now.

Labels: ,

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I would venture to say he's even MORE wrong, now.

12:35 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home