Also:
I'm just catching up on a workday lost to a few setbacks: some snail related, some more personal.
Regarding the Snail: I'm going to go across town to see if I can find a nice refurbished laptop to replace it... later this week.
Lots of catching up to do first!
But my newsletter on McNamara went out this morning to subscribers, with a wee opening essay reflecting on why we can't seem to learn from history, free to read by all.
More soon! Email next.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/on-foxes-henhouses-and-the-fog-of
@MLClark Re "On Foxes ..."
As the events of the W. Bush administration and Iraq unfolded, I knew it was all bollocks. The White House was relying on members of Congress being too afraid of appearing weak to say no.
The first week of the W. administration in January 2001, Cheney called a cabinet meeting in which he rolled out a map showing Iraqi oil fields. He talked about how the admin would seize the oil fields and turn them over to U.S. oil companies ... (1/x)
@MLClark This was verified in the memoirs of two Cabinet secretaries who were in the room at the time. All the admin needed was an excuse.
Bin Laden gave them one.
Colin Powell's UN presentation was intended to invoke the memory of Adlai Stevenson confronting the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. This time, though, the evidence clearly was very thin. Powell, ever the good soldier, followed orders rather than challenging the evidence ... (2/x)
@MLClark I could see the train wreck coming. All they talked about was victory. The public rhetoric was that the Iraqi people would greet our soldiers with garlands of flowers, which was delusional. Anyone remember Vietnam?!
But we learned later about Cheney's plan to seize the oil fields. No one cared about their blowback.
The Iraqi people had no tradition of democracy. They were many tribes forced inside an artificial boundary ... (3/x)
@MLClark As you correctly noted, anyone with an ounce of knowledge about history could see what was about to happen. I knew it at the time, I feared it, could see the train barreling off the tracks, but there was nothing I could do.
Thank goodness Biden realizes all this. I think Trump would have lobbed a nuke at Gaza and started WW3. (4/4)