Negroponte and the puppets
There is a very good article in Salon today about John Negroponte our new "viceroy" in Iraq.
Salon.com | Bush's see-no-evil man in Baghdad
For people like me who suspect that the neo-cons are still searching for ways to set up a puppet government, here’s the best quotes:
For ideologues like Abrams, operators like Negroponte and Chalabi are essential. They can actually do the dirty work of dealing with tyrants and torturers face to face. The Negropontes of the world, of course, are not torturers themselves; they do not have to be. Their history is to protect and reassure with respectable political cover the people who are.
Why has the notorious Central America A-team been reassembled 20 years later to oversee the pacification and supposed transfer of sovereignty in Iraq? Before the revelations of the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison, no one in the mainstream U.S. media would have dared raise -- and most would not even have dreamed of -- the possibility that behind the rhetoric of turning Iraq into a shining city on a hill for the rest of the Middle East, some U.S. policymakers and their think-tank acolytes might be prepared to unleash policies that would not be for the squeamish, to put it mildly.
Even now, it is probably a safe bet that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others are still hoping to come up with some plausible and presentable strongman for Iraq, convinced that if he is given a free hand to do the dirty work he deems necessary, the tidal waves of Sunni and Shiite rage alike will soon be made to go away.
The dirty war of Abu Ghraib is out of the bottle, and Abrams and Negroponte will not be able to provide the kind of politically acceptable cover for tough measures they specialized in long ago, which the practitioners of the Central American model were confident would also pacify Iraq. Negroponte will head to Baghdad come July as an enabler without, for once, having a strongman to enable -- and without the reliable Honduran Army to do the dirty work. But those methods could only work in the shadows, not in unrelenting light. He arrives at his post in Baghdad with the whole world watching.
Salon.com | Bush's see-no-evil man in Baghdad
For people like me who suspect that the neo-cons are still searching for ways to set up a puppet government, here’s the best quotes:
For ideologues like Abrams, operators like Negroponte and Chalabi are essential. They can actually do the dirty work of dealing with tyrants and torturers face to face. The Negropontes of the world, of course, are not torturers themselves; they do not have to be. Their history is to protect and reassure with respectable political cover the people who are.
Why has the notorious Central America A-team been reassembled 20 years later to oversee the pacification and supposed transfer of sovereignty in Iraq? Before the revelations of the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison, no one in the mainstream U.S. media would have dared raise -- and most would not even have dreamed of -- the possibility that behind the rhetoric of turning Iraq into a shining city on a hill for the rest of the Middle East, some U.S. policymakers and their think-tank acolytes might be prepared to unleash policies that would not be for the squeamish, to put it mildly.
Even now, it is probably a safe bet that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others are still hoping to come up with some plausible and presentable strongman for Iraq, convinced that if he is given a free hand to do the dirty work he deems necessary, the tidal waves of Sunni and Shiite rage alike will soon be made to go away.
The dirty war of Abu Ghraib is out of the bottle, and Abrams and Negroponte will not be able to provide the kind of politically acceptable cover for tough measures they specialized in long ago, which the practitioners of the Central American model were confident would also pacify Iraq. Negroponte will head to Baghdad come July as an enabler without, for once, having a strongman to enable -- and without the reliable Honduran Army to do the dirty work. But those methods could only work in the shadows, not in unrelenting light. He arrives at his post in Baghdad with the whole world watching.
posted by Zack at 11:17 AM
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