A mass murder of errors

No End in Sight is a catalog of errors. Would that it were a comedy of them, instead of the death warrant of hundreds of thousands. The bloody, disastrous errors: Bypassing the State Department’s post-conflict plans in favor of the neocons’ ignorant fantasies. Refusing to declare martial law and stop the trashing of the infrastructure and the looting of 7000 years of history. Disbanding the Iraqi military (incredibly, the US military in country wasn’t alerted about this beforehand). The Chalibi-fetish. The grotesque “neocon kindergarten,” in which baby ideologues with nothing but GOP connections where shipped in to make manifest their adolescent fantasies. And all presided over by the bon mots of Donald Rumsfeld (who unsurprisingly refused to be interviewed) grimacing through his death’s head skull while reporters chuckle at his witticisms.

But those who did talk are other insiders, members of what during the foreign policy disaster in Vietnam were called “the Establishment,” professionals (lots of lapel pins in evidence) from the War and State Departments and associated entities, who tell of their disbelief and disgust about what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Feith, & Powell (by dint of his “loyalty,” the god-damned fool) and the rest wrought. It’s a powerful document indeed.

And yet… the primary error, the invasion itself, is not a matter of discussion in this documentary. This is, after all, a rather mainstream perspective. Indeed, at one point there’s a title card about the “many people who tried to save a nation.” Bullshit! Good-hearted people trying to do the noble job of nation-building is simply irrelevant to the underlying motives for the war and the uses of the resulting chaos. Because the chaos is useful: it keeps troops in the Gulf, it maintains Cheney’s ministate and GOP dominance at home and continues the long national security state control over domestic democracy.

The national security state, bipartisan to its core, agrees that “withdrawal” is merely a soporific for domestic consumption: the military presence in the country formerly known as Iraq is supposed to be permanent. The front-runners of both parties fully subscribed to the hegemonic American mission to control Middle Eastern oil, not that they would ever admit that, of course. Oil out, weapons in, & finance capital uber alles are their gods and masters, Clinton/Obama as much as Ghouliani/Thompson.