Pentagon Analyst Speaks Out Again

After making news by denouncing the poor planning in Rumsfeld's DOD for occupying Iraq, Karen Kwiatkowski now writes about Occupied America.

There are some interesting differences between living in neoconservative occupied America and neoconservative occupied Iraq. Our neoconservatives came in under cover of presidential appointment and moved catlike from cozy American Enterprise Institute conference rooms into even cozier offices in the E-Ring of the Pentagon, to sunny floors of the State Department, and into the baroque curves and corners of the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House.

Iraq’s neoconservatives came to town smelling of diesel sucked in through the air conditioners of their Toyota LandRovers bumping up behind a line of U.S. Army tanks.

The results have been much the same in both cases. Foreign and domestic policy for the respective countries must seem, to the average American as to the average Iraqi, to be designed and implemented by space aliens.

In occupied America, we have not yet been delivered into that Joplinesque freedom of having nothing left to lose. We still think that our government tells the truth, to the extent that if we observe the government lying, we – like abused women at the violent hands of some drunken boyfriend – make excuses. He didn’t really mean it, it was for my own good, he’s really a good man when he isn’t drinking or having a bad day.

While Leiberman accuses quasi-fiscally conservative Dean of being too far left, and Bush wonders if Colin Powell will really quit and what that does to his 2004 chances if the man starts talking about what really happened this year, occupied America cowers, hoping the beatings will stop soon.

All this and she has a link to Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle!

Rumsfeld lost another analyst, we gain another voice warning of the insanity in Washington. Her archives are here and here (with discusion).

She apparently came to the same conclusions at the same time as I did with more insight and more first-hand experience. Here she is on 27 August 2002:

Richard Perle believes that a US military campaign in the heart of Arab Muslim culture will defeat the secular dictators and unpopular royals in the region, and free the democratic people there to become unified peaceful neighbors and good trading partners with the U.S. I mean, this isn't the Crusades, or even extension of Zionism. This is just good business, right?

Osama, on the other hand, well… shares this vision, up to and including the unification part, with one minor insight that Richard Perle has ignored. Unilateral offensive action by the U.S., ill defined in its objective and unrelated to a clear and present danger, is consequently impossible to intellectually defend or to materially prosecute as a just war. Such a military action, "war" if you will, the word cheapened by its promiscuous usage in this country, will indeed unify the Arab peoples in a way only unjust attacks by a superior military force can do. This is a consequence Osama cheers as having the added attraction of fueling anti-U.S. politics in the new "democracies." Perle apparently ignores this side effect with either a "not gonna happen" or "so what," illustrating a casual regard for consequences shared by megalomaniacs, wherever we find them.

Osama, on his own or with al Qaeda, could not effect the crumbling of Western democratic practices and moral values of justice. The attacks on New York and Washington were not enough to break or even weaken the spirit of Americans or America. But by sparking an illogical frenzy of unfulfilled ambitions amongst key advisors to the executive office, pressing to bypass democratic or moral concerns long treasured in America if not always practiced, Perle and company provide the missing link for Osama's dreamscape.