Not directly, no. But it's not as if there was no
by
Inkberrow
09/05/2009, 6:38 PM #
connection whatsoever to Muslim terrorism generally, or to 9/11. The neo-cons just didn't have the guts to justify it for what it was, no more and no less---they had to talk New Manifest Destiny, and otherwise gild the lily, viz. with immediate WMD alarums.
The "it" in "justify it for what it was"? Regime change, pure and simple. Given the litany of terrorist attacks on Israel and Western civilian targets since the final defeat of Pan-Muslim conventional military pretensions in the seventies, a litany of attacks culminating in 9/11, the U.S. properly was entitled to remove by force any tinpot Middle Eastern head of state who wanted to play chicken with the U.N., Israel, and the West, as well as any facially cooperative head of state unwilling or unable to not only keep his or her own house clean from but proactively discourage malevolent filth like Osama Bin Laden. Saddam Hussein wanted to rattle his saber even after 9/11, and so an example needed to be made of him for the benefit of other Middle Eastern Muslim placeholders, each one of whom rejoiced and wished to replicate 9/11, some secretly, some openly. Sunni or Shiite, religious or merely observant, they all have implacable common cause re Israel and the West. The Rumsfeld/Kristol neo-con mistake was a combination of a foolish set of Manifest Destiny assumptions concerning the pliability and "Westernability" of the Muslim rank and file, plus politically-driven weakness in the face of progressive humanitarian concerns, leading to the utterly unnecessary and ill-conceived assumption of responsibility for keeping the peace and reforming the Iraqi society. After Saddam's ouster, we should have packed our bags, with the rest of it their own damn business. As if it's our fault if these Adults Not Properly Subject To Our Judgemental Cultural Bigotry decide to kill each other en masse! If another West and Israel-threatening saber-rattler came to power in Iraq, he knows the deal same as his predecessor.
The ahistorical canard indulged in by prog-pacifist critics of our (continued) willingness to commit soldiers to a self-interested foreign policy, is that some Golden Era existed in which America was largely or even notably beloved and/or respected by the so-called "world community", itself an absurd formulation. Ever since America started to hit the big-time industrially and militarily, and exclusively so since Teddy R's famous naval parade around the world, we have been envied, feared, loathed, and distrusted by the vast bulk of world nation-states at any one time. Force and threat of force is the only thing our rivals and detractors have ever understood, and that reality has not altered one jot even if our haters supply and succor "ragtag" (but well-financed) populist/religious "freedom-fighters" as fronts in lieu of conventional engagement. Today's pacifists are as misguided as Lindbergh and his fellow opponents to America's entering WWII. That's still true even though from necessity America's rivals and detractors have forsworn (for now) that conventional frontal engagement in favor of attempts to undercut---through a war of moral attrition, and with the assistance of co-opted American-grown guilt-mongerers---America's national pride, resolve, and bald, unapologetic, unilateral exercise of national will and sovereignty.
