The first isn’t anything new. We’ve known that the White House ignored whatever information wasn’t useful to their case for war. That meant ignoring consensus on al Qaeda-Iraq ties and ignoring significant dissent over uranium from Africa. A significant portion of their case was based on some evidence, so it’s hard to say they were lying (about all of it, anyway). Still, twisting the facts to make the case for an invasion that would cost significant loss of life is intolerable.

The second story is also not surprising, but still worth mentioning. Our presence in the Middle East drives terrorist recruitment. When we choose our excursions wisely (Afghanistan, for now) the benefits (a weakened and scattered al Qaeda) outweigh the costs (anger over our presence and civilian deaths). When we don’t, well, we get Iraq. Neocon fantasies about an Iraq that loves us and helps us in the region aren’t reality. Our presence there is toxic.

Of course, the major question that comes up is: why? Why all the mistakes? Why the errors in judgment? It’s asked at the end of the film, but not answered. As you’ve probably noticed previously, I have my own opinion and I think it explains these events the best. The Bush administration went into this with ideological zealotry (of the neoconservatism variety, to be specific) that blinded them from making reasonable decisions. Of course, had they not been so blinded, their inexperience and general incompetency would have been another stumbling block. As it stands, the sheer magnitude of their failures defies simple incompetency.

In any case, check it out. It’s depressing, but definitely worth seeing.

This is just how it was in Germany in the ’30s, man.

With that out of the way, on to the substance.

I’ve pointed out on here that I don’t buy that this war was about oil. This is still the case, though I will point out that I don’t believe oil played no part. It’s a valuable strategic resource and it plays a role in anything we do in the Middle East. Having a non-negative impact on our strategic needs regarding oil is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a war.

In my view, the war is a complex confluence of different influences, but the primary one is the Neoconservative belief that America should assert her role as a global superpower and combat any threats militarily and export democracy as we do so.

Let’s start prior to 9/11. There were a few Neoconservatives who were sympathetic to Iraqi exiles, specifically Paul Wolfowitz. David Wurmser wrote a book about Iraq and how removing Saddam would have numerous positive consequences for the region. The fact that we didn’t remove Saddam during the first Gulf War came to be seen as a failure. Meanwhile, Iraq continues to rebel against the sanctions imposed on it, leading to Clinton’s bombing.

Then we have 9/11. The Bush administration starts with a logical war, attacking Afghanistan. Whatever you may think of it, the war in Afghanistan makes a lot of sense in terms of fighting al Qaeda. The Taliban was harboring al Qaeda and essentially giving them a home base. The Bush administration also correctly assumed that al Qaeda is bigger than just Afghanistan and that war is not going to solve the entire problem.

Iraq is strategically valuable. It has a lot of oil and would provide us with an impressive strategic position in the Middle East. An ally in addition to Israel (Saudi Arabia’s alliance with us excluded) would be a boon to our fight against terrorism. Iraq is also under the control of a brutal dictator. A staging ground for further operations in the region, a hand in a major oil producing country, and a free democracy to serve as an example to the region. We have this great guy to put in charge at the start and move the country to a free and liberal society. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

That’s hard to sell, though. There’s real no direct link to anti-American terrorism or 9/11. No obvious danger to Saddam staying in power. What are they to do? Cook up some other reasons, of course. The CIA thinks they have chemical and biological weapons. No evidence, but a solid, reasonable suspicion. Nuclear weapons? Far more nebulous. It’s something, though. Iraq also has links to terrorists, but nothing anti-American. Well, that’s no good, so intelligence is scoured and the claim is made anyway, with no solid backing. And hey, they can’t forget to throw in the warm and fuzzy part of the real reasons: democracy.

In short, the war was primarily a vehicle to create a friendly country that would serve as a beacon to the region, destabilizing the elements we dislike and bringing about a wave of democracy, while being in a strategic position for us.

I tend to take people at their word unless I have a reason not to. The main reasons proffered by the administration were highly suspect, so I don’t believe them. In other venues, the idea of strategic positioning and democracy promotion has been openly acknowledged and there’s little reason to doubt it.

My key piece of evidence is as follows. The prosecution of the war has been a disaster. Incompetent policies put in place by incompetent people. Only, most of the problems were anticipated. We’ve all heard the Cheney quote about Iraq by now. Several reports were produced by different government departments outlining negative scenarios. All of it was ignored. This has been a catastrophic failure and one that was anticipated. A realist view that we need to control Iraq’s oil doesn’t make sense here. Chaos doesn’t help. A stable flow of oil is what we want here. Throwing caution to the wind and uprooting a society is risky. To ignore the possibility that something will go wrong isn’t a trait of relatively intelligent realists, it’s a trait for horrendously stupid realists. I don’t think this administration as a whole is horrendously stupid. On the other hand, an ideology that holds everyone wants America’s benign power to help them and put them on the path to freedom fits much better. Do we have to worry about things going wrong? Only if our core assumptions about the world are wrong. I don’t know about you, but my core beliefs about the world are pretty ingrained and I’m pretty damn insecure. These people aren’t.

So there it is. That’s pretty much what I believe happened and why. Realist domination of oil resources isn’t the best explanation of what is the most striking event of this war: the horrific execution.

Petraeus’s plan would rotate 2,200 Marines out of Anbar province in western Iraq this month without replacing them, then begin pulling out 17,500 Army troops and 2,000 more Marines starting in mid-December. If logistics personnel and other supporting troops are also withdrawn, that would return force levels to the “pre-surge” number of 130,000 by mid-July. The general asked Congress to defer decisions on further reductions until March to get a better sense of the political and security situation.

…

“What I recommended was a very substantial withdrawal,” Petraeus countered.

A substantial withdrawal…that we essentially have to do, as our current troop level isn’t sustainable. Which is why it’s a “surge” and not a permanent increase. So the substantial withdrawal is the unavoidable withdrawal of the troops we sent in temporarily. I’m satisfied, aren’t you?

And of course, Iraqis don’t think the surge is working and there doesn’t actually appear to be a decrease in violence.

Finally, the overriding message of these briefings seems to be this: don’t make any decisions yet. After a surge that was supposed to work by now. The surge appears to have had only a minor effect and they have nothing else to offer. If we keep doing the same thing over and over, eventually we’ll get a different result, right?

It’s sort of an interesting tape. Lots of reports have noted how topical (if that’s the right word) it is, mentioning global warming, the subprime mortgage collapse, etc. His rhetoric resembles that of the anti-war crowd at points (at times the extreme edge of that crowd, at others the mainstream). This has, of course, prompted stupid comments from people like Dinesh D’Souza:

Why, you may ask, would Bin Laden praise these leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy? First, he recognizes that there are many on the left who hate Bush as much as he does and who share his desire that Bush’s war in Iraq, and Bush’s foreign policy more generally, end in complete failure. Surely Bin Laden doesn’t share the permissive social values of the left, but he has figured out that the enemy of his enemy is his de facto ally, working with him toward a common goal. Second, Bin Laden recognizes that he couldn’t possibly convince Americans to pull out of Iraq. Fortunately for him he doesn’t have to. There is already a political movement in America, led by the pundits and activists of the left, who are working overtime and without pay to secure Bin Laden’s chief objectives. Thus the chief architect of 9/11 can simply refer Americans to their own homegrown leftists in order to get the Bin Laden line.

This isn’t a new tactic. Anytime bin Laden says something that resembles a criticism of the war, it’s used as a smear by the Right. Why, bin Laden believes we should end the war and so does the Left! They must be working together to destroy America! It’s a cheap shot for intellectual lightweights who are desperately trying to avoid the obvious conclusion that the war is a complete and utter failure.

It also brings out the moron in the people who want to lead us. Case in point, Mitt Romney:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says the recent release of a video tape featuring comments from Osama bin Laden shows how “deluded” bin Laden really is.

“His comments as a radical jihadist and the idea of people converting to Islam under the threat of coersion — these kinds of principles are not in line, if you will, rational thought in my view,” Romney says.

…

“I think the whole radical jihadist movement is extraordinarily misguided and evil and is a form of delusion but I believe that the people of the world recognize that,” Romney said. “I think when he makes tapes like this, it hurts his effort. It doesn’t help it.”

Good heavens, I just can’t imagine how that bin Laden guy believes such things! It’s just too much for my little brain to handle.

Oh please. The guy who believes that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri is criticizing someone’s rationality? It’s just too much for me (yeah, it’s cheap shot, sue me). For fuck’s sake, I would think a religious person could figure this out. Bin Laden is a theocrat. It’s really not hard to figure out his train of thought if you start with a few basic assumptions taken on faith. It’s rather easy to justify just about anything doing that.

Anyone who dismisses Jihadism as nothing more than an evil delusion has no business running our foreign policy. These are people with goals and reasons for their actions, just like most other people. That isn’t to say they can be reasoned with, but if you refuse to understand your enemy you will lose. If we cling to a shallow, myopic view of this conflict as the good, rational people vs. crazy, evil delusional people, we’ll just continue bombing innocent brown people and making more terrorists.

There’s a stranger part in Andy’s post, however:

This, along with their (al Qaeda) beheadings and Saddam’s evil atrocities is not reason enough to wipe these monsters out? I’m sure most of the Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and Pilots fighting in Iraq right now would love to kill one of these al Qaedas.

Who’s saying we shouldn’t wipe out al Qaeda? I don’t think there’s a lack of will here. It always perplexes me when people are roused to fierce denunciations of groups like al Qaeda and claim they should be wiped out. Don’t we sort of already know this? The problem is the how, not the why. There isn’t some magic policy that we can just implement and starting wiping these people out without bringing death and destruction to lots of people who don’t deserve it (and who we’re ostensibly trying to protect).

It’s curious to me.

That is, by the way, me saying I’m in favor of withdrawal. The date proposed is a bit far off, perhaps, but we need to be out. I’ve been avoiding saying we should withdraw out of concern for the events that will follow. At this point I’d have to say that all we’re doing is delaying the inevitable. The best we can do is attempt to withdraw as cleanly as possible. Which, of course, isn’t going to be successful, but have to try (and that means handling the massive increase in refugees fleeing the renewed violence, too).

I believe Dave (who, I have on good authority, is still alive and actually completing a course of reformative therapy at the hands of David Sirota) warned of the consequences for American foreign policy if we withdraw a while back. I’m not entirely sure such consequences are bad, however. If we never try something on the scale of what we’re doing in Iraq again, is that a bad thing? Transforming an entire society appears to be out of our reach (and unsurprisingly so). How many more lives would we waste of further endeavors of this kind? Full-on nation building via military force is something to avoid, not regret our inability to summon the support for it.

Back to the Democrats. With Obama making empty threats, do I have anyone to turn to? Clinton is simply not impressive. I don’t believe she’d be a bad president, but she wouldn’t be more than average. Then again, I’d be happy with average at this point. John Edwards? I admittedly need to do more research, but I’m not entirely sure about his economic policies. The word “populist” is bandied about quite a bit, which makes me a little wary. Perhaps there’s no good reason for that, but there it is. Those are the big three. Richardson is appealing, but doesn’t appear to have a shot. So at this stage in the game, I’m not entirely impressed. There’s a lot of time left, however, and anything could happen. We’ll just have to see.

“You’ve got a situation where the American Left is choosing to side with Islamo-fascists,” says the Clinton aide. “What does that tell you about what their true intentions are?”

You can’t argue with that logic. I remember the day I chose to side with the Islamo-fascists. I thought to myself, “wow, these people are against everything I value: reason, secularism, liberty, democracy…that’s the side for me!”

The author is concerned about what that portends for the nation. “I think we will never win another war militarily,” he says. “We will lose our way of life, we will lose the freedoms … and liberties we have in this country if we don’t defeat the enemy from within — and that’s the American Left.”

I will not be defeated! You’ll have to do far more that detain me for protesting the war. Come on, bust out the internment camps already!

Patterson says “secular liberals and secular progressives” hate America and everything it stands for, and would much rather see the U.S. defeated than victorious in Iraq.

There’s just something about being secular that makes you hate a country built on the separation of church and state.

We’ve successfully convicted the fall guy. He certainly wasn’t innocent in the whole thing, but let’s face it, he’s not who the Left wanted out of this. They had their sights set on Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Alas, we got Libby for protecting Cheney, it appears.

It’s been shown time and time again that this administration has little regard for honesty and this is a good example. Going on the idea that Drum suggests here, Cheney went ballistic trying to cover up what the White House knew about the Nigerian forgeries. Lies to protect more lies. It’s certainly not unprecedented, but it’s disheartening.

Is this conviction going to stop them? I don’t see it. They don’t have much time left, so at least it’s unlikely they’ll do much more damage. What have they learned at this point? It seems like very little. Constant failures and embarrassments should have taught them something, but here we are, sending the fall guy to prison. Until Bush pardons him, that is.