Iraq & Hard Place

Accuracy in Academia ^ | April 6, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[bs9021]

Iraq & Hard Place

Malcolm A. Kline, April 6, 2010

One of the crowning ironies of the age, to use a really pretentious phrase, is that the main site of anti-war rallies staged over the past decade—academia—is also the source of American foreign policy in Iraq. Witness, the CIA director who told President George W. Bush that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “slam dunk” became a professor at Georgetown where he could look out the window and see his old boss hung in effigy for following the former top spy’s advice.

“This is because the logic that flows from the heights of American universities through the bureaucracies and the war colleges, which transforms conscientious junior officers into nodding generals, forecloses fruitful options leaving only the choice between the futility of nation-building and the deadly unseriousness of drone strikes and hit teams,” Angelo M. Codevilla writes in the Winter 2009/10 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. “Typical of our ruling class’s decisions, President Obama’s December 2009 Afghanistan plan committed to both: to nation-building while denying that he was doing so, and to remote strikes while holding out no hope of eliminating enemy strongholds.” Codevilla is a professor emeritus at Boston University. The Claremont Review is published by the Claremont Institute.

“Only one fifth of American casualties came in what one normally thinks of as combat,” Codevilla notes of the Iraq operation. “Some three fifths came from ‘improvised explosive devices,’ roadside bombs, or other booby traps. That is, from our troops having to operate in what amounted to a constantly replenished minefield.”

“About one fifth came from rules of engagement that prohibited our troops from defending themselves until after enemies had started killing them.”...

[pissant]

Did Ron Paul write this?