Amazing Research

First off, here's a great article written by a guy a couple of years ago with the intention of poking holes in the neocon argument for going to war with Iraq. Instead, what he found was that the neocon vision, while being flawed and reckless and often full of half-truths, has been right more often than the foreign policy establishment over the past twenty years. The Iraq war, he concludes would be justified. Interesting, no? It's sort of how I started out...thinking, this is crazy, insane going to Iraq - but the more I read about the region, the issues surrounding rouge states and terrorism, the more I saw the overall logic and how it might work. What is interesting, is the neocon predictions in this article have largely held up in the war itself. The most important ommission has been identification of foreign fighters coming into Iraq and causing a problem. Most people were more concerned with Saddam loyalists fighting it out in the streets of Baghdad. Neocons argued, in typical fashion: "They won't." This irked the establishment (State and Pentagon) who like to say, "But what if? And then, worst case scenario..."

The neocons in this case were right, the war went as smooth as to be expected. No one quite planned for the aftermath, the insurgency, but we've handed over power now and Iraq has sovereignty, albeit with 120,000 American troops lurking around.

Needless to say, the jury is still out...

The other interesting thing that I've found in doing research on newspaper articles over the past 3 years for how Arabs are depicted in the media is that many statements from Bush and Blair and company have turned out to be wrong...the WMDs, etc. The statement from Saddam Hussein, however, have often turned out to be right - we don't have WMDs, we have no ties to Al Queda, etc. It's a little ironic, I think.