The "Prescience" of the Anti-War Crowd
The anti-war crowd was unable to predict with precise detail the disaster which unfolded while the pro-war crowd's precise predictions about the success simply never materialized.
And let's not forget one of Dale Franks' eliminationist hits. Never tire of hearing that kind of rhetoric.
Still, what I posted on the eve of war looks fairly prescient...
one year from now, if Iraq is essentially the same security state as Palestine is under Israel today we have a 10 year occupation on our hands. If we still have troops fighting, suicide bombers and all the trappings of modern day Palestine, the critics of this war with Iraq are right. The administration has sold us a bill of goods that we were going to paying for decades from now - occupation of chaos is costly both in dollar terms and lives lost.
But even so, it's pretty amazing how short Franks' memory truly is. Heck, it was literally just days before Bush opened the main event that we learned that the state department had written things like this
Even if some version of democracy took root -- an event the report casts as unlikely -- anti-American sentiment is so pervasive that elections in the short term could lead to the rise of Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the United States.
"Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve," says one passage of the report, according to an intelligence official who agreed to read portions of it to the Los Angeles Times. "Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements."
The thrust of the document, the source said, "is that this idea that you're going to transform the Middle East and fundamentally alter its trajectory is not credible."
Sounds pretty damn prescient to me.
But I guess Franks wanted dates, times and names of troops killed for the next three years or - well - we're all just a bunch of amateurs compared to the abilities of his gigantic brain.
Leave a comment