The Little Brown Reader

From heroes to targets

I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.

Salon.com News | From heroes to targets

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.

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By Michelle Goldberg

July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.

America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.

The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."

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