Palace Rifts And Allies Of Convenience

An interesting article exploring the tensions between the republicans, the neocons, and the christians in the Bush Junta. Some of these groups are more hawkish than others: some would settle for a negotiated peace with a new post-Saddam Iraqi hardliner while others want nothing less than unconditional surrender followed by draconian occupation. Apparently, the Pentagon would really prefert the former over the latter. This rift is reflected in the White House statements on “regime change”. Earlier they announced that if someone “dealt with” Saddam, they would deal with them. Now they are currently maintaining they will accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. The current scorched earth invasion policy leaves the in-country anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition high, dry, and dusted.

The US is going to diss Iraqi dissidents heavily, I suspect, because they are mostly Islamist, Shi’ite, and tilted towards Iran. The US will probably want to install a corporatist, groomed apparatchik with oil corp connections as leader, similar to Afghanistan’s compliant Karzai. The Iraqis themselves probably have very different ideas but many of them could be co-opted by the new regime. Many of the current bigwigs there will be given an option to join the US-led occupation regime in an effortless leopard-spot-changing sleight-of-hand:

So the jackbooted goons who’ve been terrorizing Iraq for decades will be given some new career options. Imagine if the Allies had invaded Germany and offered all the SS guys their old jobs back? It’s meet the new boss, same as the old boss!

I’ve used this Vietnam-era quote before but it’s worth trying to remember some of the lessons the US learned from that unilateral, pre-emptive war (instigated, that time, by the French… who then wussed out and quit the country):

In Vietnam, the United States pursued its interests, as it perceived them, throughout; and as its perceptions changed, so did its allegiances, as any great power’s would. The rest was rhetoric … What political lessons can we learn from this tangle? First, great powers are fickle, and only care about themselves, not their small allies of opportunity, the Generals Thieu and Th� of the present and future. Then again, there is no such thing as a trustworthy surrogate: they have wills of their own, aims that may coincide with their protectors’ only in the short term, and an alarming ability to drag great powers into their quarrels and to change sides when the dollars dry up.

And those dollars do have an eerie way of drying up. The sociopaths in charge of budgets have no qualms about going all super spendy when it comes to guns, but try asking them to pay for butter. People in the US seem confused why the developing world seesm to prefer Euro and Asian influence over US influence: it’s simple aid economics. THey know that once the troops go home it’s the Europeans and the Asians who will be feeding and clothing them while most of the paltry US “foreign aid” budget goes to support Egypt and Israel.

Earlier here.