Neocon Voodoo Dolls

I urge you to check out Glenn Greenwald today. He's sticking so many skewers in the neocon liars' last line of defense that they look like voodoo dolls.

Mind you, the neocons themselves seemed to think voodoo would work better than a decent plan when it came to the original invasion of Iraq.

the plan drafted by the US Central Command in June 1999 as a result of interagency wargames contained a set of recommendations that got mysteriously "forgotten" once Operation "Iraqi Freedom" got under way.

More than 70 experts from the Defense and State Departments, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House, who took part in the wargames dubbed "Desert Crossing", believed it would take at least 400,000 US troops to stabilize Iraq following the removal of the government of Saddam Hussein, the document showed.

The intervention, they insisted, must be "swift, large-scale, and decisive."

Instead, the number of US troops in Iraq has never topped 160,000 and currently stands at about 144,000, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arguing that a large US "footprint" in Iraq would be counterproductive.

The plan also called for "co-opting and cooperating with Iraqi forces" that would not display hostility toward advancing US and British troops.

However, then-US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi military soon after the April 2003 fall of Baghdad, a decision he now says he regrets.

The invasion, according to the blueprint, was also to be backed by massive infusions of economic and humanitarian aid.

"If food and drinking water cannot be distributed, if reconstruction progress does not provide incentives to refrain from renewing hostilities, or if minorities perceive that the social system will not protect them, then peace may be lost," the document presciently warned.

Many key reconstruction projects remain stalled to this day due to a lack of security, according to US auditors.

Success in Iraq, US military planners reasoned, would also be predicated on two major diplomatic breakthroughs, none of which ever materialized: a new start with Iran and an Arab coalition in support of the invasion.

Given how intimately the neocons were embedded into the Bush heirarchy, from Cheney and Perle on down, to now be blaming that heirachy but saying they temselves had nothing to do with the administration's failures is just ludicrous.