Why?

Add the corporate media’s stenographic services, a cheap forgery about Niger yellowcake, and the fantasies of a crazy informant to the headlong determination of the neoconservatives to go to war in Iraq and you’ve pretty much got the “how.” Thomas Powers gives an amazingly good summary in the NYRB of the neocon drive to war as he takes apart Richard Tenet’s self-serving whitewash of a book. Tenet should have written his book in prison along with the others who have gotten away with mass murder: Cheney and his crew of neocon ghouls; Rumsfeld playing patty-cake at the war department; good soldier Colin Powell, who knows from Nuremburg that being a good soldier is not a legitimate excuse; that hack Rice and the rest of the President’s lapdogs; and of course, the Idiot Prince himself.

But the question still remains “why.” Politically, it seems clear that the War Party wanted both to show it had the right stuff to do something about 9/11 and to use that right stuff to consolidate its power domestically. I mean much more than paint the Democrats as treasonous, of course, although that too was rather successful for a time.

For our history shows us time and again that overseas adventures are the perfect excuse to clamp down on threats to elite control, as shown by the dissolution of the populist movement during the Spanish- American War, the suppression of the progressive movement by the First World War, and the taming of radical elements in the labor movement during the Cold War. These threats to the powers-that-were were set nicely aside by the tides of conforming nationalism, xenophobia, jingoism, Red Scares, and the like. (An exception is the Civil Rights movement, which survived even as Vietnam bled and the original "neocons" of the Neoconfederacy used the Red Scare playbook in attempting to de-legitimize it.)

Of course, there was no reformist threat at the beginning of the 21st century. (The bond market’s bondsman Bill Clinton had seen to that quite nicely). But there was the long project of the neoconservatives to supplant what we have of democracy with their brand of authoritarianism, a combination of neoliberal market fundamentalism (excepting for unfettered government control in matters of police, incarceration, and wealth transfer), with its magnificent success in restoring class power to robber baron levels, and the supposed moral rigors of Christian theocracy (in practice, just another corrupt patronage mill). Cheney and Rumsfeld, for example, both made plain their burning desire to undo the mild constraints on Executive overreach following Watergate, where they both cut their very sharp teeth, and largely succeeded in the wake of the national emergency of 9/11. They got their Reichstag fire. Cheney, the Cardinal Richelieu behind the Son King’s empty throne, and the intellectual gurus of neoconservatism have made their contempt for democracy loud and clear from their offices, coin-operated think tanks, corporate sinecures, and media cat-bird seats. War is their dream come true: they need it to last forever, it’s what gives them meaning, and power.

They saw their chances and took ‘em. Politics 101. It’s an oft-brutal endeavor, especially when the stakes are hegemonic. When you add hegemonic domestic power to military control of Middle East oil (plus keeping China at bay), pouring billions into the war industries (and gutting social spending), it all adds up.