Connecting the dots: (well, more accurately, following the links)

Josh Marshall at TPM has a few words about conservatives like Ciifford May in the NRO, who, among other things, is attacking Joseph Wilson IV. (He's the former ambassador who was dispatched to check out the Niger-yellowcake story, found it to be without merit, reported it to the CIA, and wrote an OpEd about it in the New York Times last week.) May claims that Wilson is "a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to grind" and notes that Wilson wrote an article this February in the Nation. That was news to us. We pretty much assumed that the "former ambassador" we were hearing about, and who eventually outed himself as J Wilson IV, was totally apolitical. Apparently not. Anyway, his essay in the Nation was pretty interesting. It's worth a read. Here are some excerpts: (emphasis added)

The upcoming military operation also has one objective, though different from the several offered by the Bush Administration. This war is not about weapons of mass destruction. The intrusive inspections are disrupting Saddam's programs, as even the Administration has acknowledged. Nor is it about terrorism. Virtually all agree war will spawn more terrorism, not less. It is not even about liberation of an oppressed people. Killing innocent Iraqi civilians in a full frontal assault is hardly the only or best way to liberate a people. The underlying objective of this war is the imposition of a Pax Americana on the region and installation of vassal regimes that will control restive populations.

The neoconservatives with a stranglehold on the foreign policy of the Republican Party, a party that traditionally eschewed foreign military adventures, want to go beyond expanding US global influence to force revolutionary change on the region. American pre-eminence in the Gulf is necessary but not sufficient for the hawks. Nothing short of conquest, occupation and imposition of handpicked leaders on a vanquished population will suffice. Iraq is the linchpin for this broader assault on the region. The new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our worldview are implanted throughout the region, a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme.

posted by Quiddity at 7/11/2003 12:05:00 PM