The Guilty Neocon

I must now come clean and confess that the war in Iraq, in clear-eyed retrospect, was an utter disaster and we should not have gone in and deposed Saddam Hussein.

Of course, I am glad that this brutal dictator will soon swing by the hangman's noose, but the situtation on the ground is far from perfect or even acceptable. We have failed the Iraqi people for the second time. We did not support the Kurds in the days and weeks after the first Gulf War and we have yet to establish order more than three years after the liberation of Iraq in the new millenium.

Three years ago, I fully believed the Neocon line that people want to live in freedom, that the Middle East needed a full-bodied democracy (Israel and Turkey excepted for obvious reasons) and that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I was duped.

Do I blame Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? No, not particularly. They clearly had their world view and stuck to it. They either created the intelligence from whole cloth or ordered it to be delivered in such a format to adhere to their world view. I do blame Colin Powell, however. Powell knew when he addressed the United Nations, a corrupt and anti-US body --but still the standard-bearer for liberals and do-gooders everywhere.

Imagine if Powell had threateaned to resign if this report were published. Imagine if he told the President that he would not sell this shabby bill of goods to the general assembly of the UN? Imagine if he resigned and gave interviews to the fawning media for a month straight.

I doubt he would have stopped the war but he might have added a spine to the Democrats and the anti-war side of the Senate and House of Reps. Powell blew his shot.

Why? Was it the old soldier's loyalty? Was it the sweep of events and the accelerated news cycle? Did his old boss -- W's father -- get to him and say 'Proptect my boy?" Sadly, we won't know. Instead, we are stuck in a quagmire with no solution in sight. Would I want my son or daughter in Iraq, standing at a machine gun turrett on an unprotected Humvee in Baghdad? No, I would not. Put me up there.

Afterall I supported the damned farce and I should be the one to go. And hey, now that the Army has raised the enlistment age to 42, what is my excuse?

None whatsoever.