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AS THE WORLD SQUIRMS
Saturday, February 10, 2007
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“Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure
wind.” ~George Orwell~
OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS
Pentagon office ‘misled’ on Iraq war
By Demetri Sevastopulo in
Munich Financial Times (FT.COM) Published: February 10 2007
01:28 | Last updated: February 10 2007 01:28 (Excerpt) A special Pentagon office [Office of Special Plans]
created in the run-up to the Iraq war engaged in “inappropriate”
activities by providing misleading intelligence to policymakers, according to
the US Department of Defense. The Pentagon inspector-general on Friday said the
Office of Special
Plans set up by Douglas Feith,
then undersecretary of defence for policy, provided senior policymakers with “alternative
intelligence assessments” on alleged links between
al-Qaeda and Iraq that were “inconsistent with the
consensus of the intelligence community”. Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of
the armed services committee and senior member of the intelligence committee,
said the report was a “devastating condemnation”
of senior Pentagon officials. “The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the
Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high ranking officials in the
Department of Defense to support the administration’s decision to invade Iraq when the intelligence
assessments of the professional analysts of the intelligence community did
not provide the desired compelling case,” said Mr Levin. The report comes at a critical time for the White
House as President George W. Bush struggles to keep Republican support for
the war in Iraq. Democrats have long argued that Mr Feith was
engaged in helping Dick Cheney, vice-president, build the case for war based on inaccurate, or misleading,
intelligence.  Council on
Foreign Relations: US Should Leave Iraq by Dave Clark Fri Feb 9, 9:02 AM ET
Yahoo News (via AFP) (Excerpt) An independent think tank warned that
the situation in Iraq was beyond repair and urged that US forces should be
pulled out whatever the result of the current "surge" of troops
into Baghdad. A report from Washington's Council on
Foreign Relations concluded that a US military victory was impossible in
Iraq, where "amateurish" post-invasion rule by American officials
had seen Iraq collapse into civil war. The respected institute's stark
assessment comes at a time of collapsing public support for the war in the
United States and mounting opposition to President George W. Bush's strategy
within Congress. "The United States has already
achieved all that it is likely to achieve in Iraq... Staying in Iraq can only
drive up the price of those gains in blood, treasure and strategic
position," wrote Steven Simon, author of the report. "The time has come to
acknowledge that the United States must fundamentally recast its commitment
to Iraq. It must do so without any illusions that there are unexplored or
magic fixes, whether diplomatic or military," he warned. "Some disasters are
irretrievable," he continued, calling for troops to be pulled out by the
end of 2008. Simon, in a paper entitled "After the Surge: The Case for US Military Disengagement
from Iraq," said troop levels are still too low to quell the fighting
but more reinforcements would make little difference in any case. The US invasion "plunged the
country into a civil war that brought about the deaths of tens of thousands
of Iraqi civilians, wrecked the country's already debilitated infrastructure,
and spurred violent sectarian rivalries." "The
crisis has now moved beyond the capacity of Washington to control on its
own... The United States lacks the military resources and the domestic and
international political support to master the situation," Simon warned.  Former U.S. security adviser says war in Iraq
calamity; could lead to Iran war
"If
the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody
involvement in Iraq, and I emphasize what I am about to say, the final
destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with
Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large," said the security
adviser in the Democratic administration of former president Jimmy Carter. National Post - Canada (via
Barry Schweid, The Associated Press) Published: Thursday, February 01, 2007 (Excerpt) WASHINGTON —
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, told Congress the war in Iraq is a calamity and likely to lead to “a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world
of Islam at large.” Testifying before the Senate foreign relations
committee Thursday, Brzezinski skewered U.S.
administration policy as driven by “imperial hubris” and a disaster on historic, strategic and moral
grounds.  The Real Purpose of US Mid-East
Policies
by Robert
Higgs LewRockwell.com 2.5.07 (Excerpt) As a general rule for
understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent
"failed" policies. Policies
that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S.
policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need
only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the
money. When you do so, I believe
you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly
successful, so successful that the
gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical,
financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those
who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must
surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars. So U.S. soldiers get
killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of
squalid concentration areas, so the "peace process" never gets far
from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the policies failures; these things
are all surface froth, costs not born by the policy makers themselves but by
the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who
count for nothing. Second, near the end of
your article, you speak of the necessity of "ending our dependence on
Persian Gulf oil." I have mentioned this matter to you before, but your
statement leads me to conclude that you have not taken my previous objection
to heart. To be as brief as possible, the U.S. is not
dependent on Persian Gulf oil in any significant economic way. Yes, the
Persian Gulf pours substantial amounts of oil into the world supply pool, and
U.S. demanders draw heavily from that pool. But the Persian Gulf sheikdoms
have every interest in selling their oil, whether Exxon Mobil, Shell, Texaco,
or somebody else does the grunt work to bring it to the surface and transport
it to the harbors. The U.S. government need do nothing special to see that
this oil continues to flow into the world's supply pool, any more than it
needs a policy of coercing the Russians to sell their oil on the world
market. Moreover, the U.S. cannot substantially reduce
its use of oil drawn from the world oil supply pool in the short or medium
terms: modern technology relies heavily on petroleum and its derivatives, and
substantial changes in relative prices and oil-related public policies of
various sorts would be required to alter this great reality, however possible
it may be to alter it in the long run by means of technological change
spurred by relative price changes. But the U.S. military presence in the Gulf
serves not to ensure that the oil keeps flowing; it merely ensures that U.S.
corporations (oil and weapons companies in particular), banks, insurance
companies, and so forth will be the specific parties raking in the
profits from dealing in the Gulf oil. If they didn't do these jobs, the jobs would still
get done, but they would get done by the efforts of other firms (European,
Chinese, Japanese, and so forth), which is precisely the point: U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East serves the purposes of specific U.S.
economic entities, which in turn more or less control the policies by the way
they exercise their financial muscle in U.S. politics. The neocon madness of the past few years is an aberration. It
has not turned out to serve the purposes of the true movers and shakers
(represented roughly by Baker and Co.), and so ultimately it will have to
give way. The dimwitted president currently
serving, who has run off the reservation by virtue of his personal ineptitude
and immaturity, may extend the present madness until he leaves office, but
eventually the actual powers that be in this country will reassert their
control. They may have to do so with a Democratic administration, but they
will still do so. Best wishes, Bob Higgs Robert Higgs [send him mail] is senior
fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute
and editor of The Independent Review. His most recent
book is Depression, War, and Cold War:
Studies in Political Economy. He
is also the author of Resurgence of the Warfare State:
The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan. Copyright
© 2007 LewRockwell.com 
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