Links and comments. posted by Richard Seymour

A few days ago I linked to a short missive by the redoubtable Andrew Bacevich, a conservative US International Relations theorist. LewRockwell.com isn't my favourite site, but it does carry an excellent riposte/complement to Bacevich here . Specifically, Michael Gaddy says, the US is not merely failing to win, but it never intended to win:

This war was, from the very get-go, designed to be a war of occupation and not a war for any other purpose. The constantly changing "goals," like the rabbit running ahead of the greyhounds, is proof positive. It was not deposing Saddam, eliminating the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction, or implementing democracy: the true goal was establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq. Had any of the aforementioned causus belli been the real purpose of this war, our troops would have been brought home when the stated goals were reached. If Bush or these Neocons had a simple cursory knowledge of history, they would know that wars of occupation always develop into a quagmire.

The author cites the Project for the New American Century and generally does the paleoconservative hatchet job on the neocons. But he goes one further, and this is a stroke of genius. He gets Larry Diamond, former senior adviser to Paul Bremer of the late CPA in Iraq, to corroborate him:

While first speaking as a supporter of the Neocon/Bush program, Diamond stated, "First of all, let me say that this election on Sunday, from everything I have read and heard, was a profoundly moving and historic experience; for Iraq, for the Middle East, and potentially for the world." This he later counters with a truth nugget, "…it was a very superficial election and in some ways a very unfair election. There were more than one hundred parties in lists. Most of them had no money, no access to the media, and no ability, obviously, in the state the country was in, to campaign."

...

"…there is something that could help now on the part of the United States which tragically is not going to happen…. One of the things that is necessary to wind down the insurgency and create a much more hopeful, enabling environment for the development of democracy and even political stability in Iraq is for Iraqis, and particularly those Iraqis who are involved with or sympathizing with the insurgency, to become convinced that we really are going to leave. That the American military occupation of Iraq is going to end and that they are going to get their country back. I urged the administration to declare when I left Iraq in April of 2004, that we have no permanent military designs on Iraq and we will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. This one statement would do an enormous amount to undermine the suspicion that we have permanent imperial intentions in Iraq. We aren't going to do that. And the reason we're not going to do that is because we are building permanent military basis in Iraq." (emphasis added) Here a man on the inside confirms Bush intends for our soldiers to have a permanent presence in Iraq. How many lives and how many trillions will this cost?

Meanwhile, Doug Ireland sends me a brilliant but flawed essay on Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy .

Brian Cook of In These Times has a chuckle at the expense of David Horowitz and his whacky new 'Discover the Network' Project', casually slipping a knife or two between the right-wing troll's shoulder-blades as he does so.

Devizes Melting Point is a great blog that will find its way onto my blog roll before being categorised somehow. The post on the Renaissance is particularly interesting, and worthy of some expansion.

Finally, I'm sure I must have mentioned it before, but I feel compelled to point out again that Alphonse is splendid. The careful montage of philosophical and classical citation expertly punctuated by Aesopian reference is accentuated by a sharp political analysis. And 'he' can be pungent too. When Susan Sontag died, all the lefties cried - but not Alphonse, who laid a few brutal kicks into her handsome corpse.

Finally, I never thought it would last . Abbas can't deliver peace to the Israelis because he has no mandate to do so, and if Al Aqsa* - which is part of the Fatah movement that Abbas heads - will not adhere to his strictures no other group will. Israel has to fulfil its obligations in international law, stop murdering Palestinians, offer generous compensation, and make arrangements for the refugees displaced by its disgusting policies. At least, if it has any concern for its citizens, it will do that.

*Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade claims responsibility for the attack, on a beach club in Tel Aviv, but is rivaled by Islamic Jihad.