« Debunking Republican Government Reform Proposals | Main | Why Is Kim Jong-Il? He's Sick of Capitalism's Beating Communism »

December 13, 2004

NEOCON REVIEW Has Second Thoughts on Iraq

Either somebody at National Review fell asleep on the job or the neocons there are starting to get it through their skulls that maybe--just maybe--they were a little naive to believe that the U.S. could "liberate" Iraq and be greeted with flowers.

Whether or not one agrees with all the analysis in this piece by Steven Vincent--and I find some of it a bit patronizing myself--it's still a welcome sign that NR would dare to exhibit any doubts about the war at all.

Writes Vincent, for example:

"If only you'd given us more time, we would have risen up and overthrown him," a waiter at the Orient Palace lectured me a couple of days later. "It's terrible, when I think of it," a student at Baghdad University said. "A foreign army has to come across the world to free us from Saddam — who are we, then?" This sense of indignity, of loss of "face," explained the ungracious gratitude many Iraqis evinced toward the U.S. — the "Thanks America, now go home" syndrome. How naïve we were to believe that they would greet our troops with flowers, as Dick Cheney so famously and wrongly predicted. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies explained in a report on Iraq's reconstruction, "the United States should expect continuing resentment and disaffection even if the U.S.-led reconstruction efforts seem to be making positive, incremental improvements to the country according to quantifiable measures. In other words, the occupation will not be judged by the sum of its consequences, but rather qua occupation."

Of course, the question now becomes: Will the gang at NR take their newfound doubts about Iraq into consideration when the time comes to start stumping for Bush's wars with Iran and/or Syria? Unfortunately, I think we know the answer to that.

Posted by Mike Tennant at December 13, 2004 10:37 AM

Comments

Post a comment