The Lobby, Unmasked

"Hark - can you hear it? Borne on the wind, can you hear the sounds of construction - of hammers hammering and woodsaws sawing? And do you detect a note of panic? I do. The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly."

The "good" ship Neocon is a pirate vessel, one that brazenly hoists the Jolly Roger and takes no prisoners: it patrols the sea-lanes in search of victims and, when it finds them, pounces without mercy or hesitation. Up until now, it has evaded all attempts to corner and sink it, and its success is due, in no small part, to its many allies and well-wishers onshore. Yet for those of us who see this crew as a prime candidate for sinking, the neocons' comeuppance on account of the collapse of the Iraq campaign is hardly enough. Their disgrace, properly conceived, has barely begun.

After all, instead of taking responsibility and owning up to their authorship of the Great Iraq Disaster, they are taking refuge behind all sorts of rationalizations: we didn't have enough troops, our strategy isn't aggressive and destructive enough, the war is being lost in the hearts and minds of the American people and not on the battlefields of Iraq, the invasion was launched while the moon was in Pisces - the neocons are nothing if not inventive when engaged in the process of covering their asses.

Parris dispatches this narrative of "a revolution betrayed" with a few thrusts of his polemical ice pick:

"The former hawks of press and politics now scramble for the status of visionaries let down by functionaries. This is a lifeboat that will not float. Let these visionaries understand that occupation is always brutal and usually resisted; that occupying armies are always tactless, sometimes abusive, and usually boneheaded; that in the argument between hands-on and hands-off you're damned if you do and damned if you don't; and that the first, original, and central cause of the Iraq fiasco was not the bad manners of this or that poor, half-educated squaddie from Missouri, nor the finer points of this or that State Department doctrine of neocolonial administration.

"The reason for failure was not the post-invasion strategy. It was the strategy of invasion. Blame the vision, not the execution."

Hear! Hear! Yet I have to wonder: is there really anyone who believes that occupations aren't brutal? We have at least some evidence that they knew it and gloried in it. The Ledeen Doctrine has its adherents. But this alone doesn't adequately answer the question of why - if it wasn't those "weapons of mass destruction," or Saddam's fabled "links" to al-Qaeda, or even the prospect of a drone attack on Passaic, New Jersey, as the president once implied, then what was it? Why did we ignore the best advice of our generals and the lessons of history to embark on a crusade that couldn't ever have been anything other than futile? Amid widespread bafflement, there are few plausible theories. As Grover Norquist described the neocons' Iraq project:

"Some people think we did it just to prove we could do it, like people who go running with weights on their ankles."

There is something to this: the Iraq war as an ideological exercise. What better way to demonstrate the neoconservative concept of "benevolent world hegemony" than to invade, conquer, and occupy a country that had never attacked us and represented no threat to our territory or legitimate interests, just because we could?