Michael Schwartz (TomDispatch): Does the Media Have It Right on the War?

[Jack Rabbit]

From TomDispatch.com
Dated Tuesday March 28

Does the Media Have It Right on the War?
By Michael Schwartz

The media loves anniversaries, the grimmer the better. On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, our newspapers and TV news were filled to the brim with retrospectives on the origins of the Iraq war, reassessments of how it was conducted by the Bush administration, and reconsiderations of the current quagmire-cum-civil-war in that country.

An amazing aspect of this sort of heavy coverage of events past is the degree of consensus that quickly develops among all mainstream outlets on certain fundamental (and fundamentally controversial) issues. For example, the question of "what went wrong" in Iraq is now almost universally answered as follows:

The invasion was initially successful, but the plan for the peace was faulty. Bush administration officials misestimated the amount of resistance they would find in the wake of Baghdad's fall. Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian officials in the Pentagon ignored military warnings and did not deploy sufficient soldiers to handle this initial resistance. As a result, the occupation was unable to quell the rebellion when it was small. This first blunder allowed what was at best a modest insurgency to grow to formidable proportions, at which point occupation officials committed a second disastrous blunder, dismantling the Iraqi army which otherwise could have been deployed to smash the rebellion.

Bottom line: General Eric Shinseki was right. If the U.S. had deployed the several hundred thousand troops that he insisted were needed to lock down the country (instead of hustling him into retirement), then the war would have been short and sweet, and the U.S. would now be well on its way both to victory and withdrawal.

This, I think, is a fair summary of the thinking on Iraq currently dominant in the mainstream media and, because it ignores the fundamental cause of the war-after-the-war -- the American attempt to neo-liberalize Iraq -- it is also profoundly wrong.

Read more and please read also the introduction by Tom Engelhardt.

[Vincardog]

1. They fail to note that the colossal failure was the plan. GW aWoL always

planned and wanted the chaos in order to establish the PERMANENT MILITARY BASES the PNAC wanted. you do remember their plan for the New American Century don't you?

[Jack Rabbit]

2. We've all read PNAC

If Bush doesn't know what PNAC is (as he claims not to know), then he dumber than we think.

Seriously, one doesn't build military bases on foreign soil because somebody thinks our GIs might like an assignment there. There's got to be something in Iraq worth the blood to somebody. What do you suppose that is?

It isn't just oil. It's whatever they have. It will fall into the able privatized hands of Western transnational corporations. Of course, there would be military bases, too, since neoliberalism has failed everywhere it has been tried and now no one would willingly embrace it. Latin Americans either reject it at the polls by electing populist leaders like Chávez or run the neoliberal puppets out of town and then elect a populist leader like Morales.

This theory of the neoliberal purpose didn't start with Michael Schwartz. Naomi Klein advanced the idea even as Saddam statue was falling:

The process of getting all this infrastructure to work is usually called "reconstruction." But American plans for Iraq's future economy go well beyond that. Rather, the country is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neoliberals can design their dream economy: fully privatized, foreign-owned and open for business . . . .

Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.

The most famous remark by Granny D is Neoliberalism is the colonialism department of neoconservatism. She has it backward. Actually, Neoconservatism is the enforcement department of neoliberalism.