Dinner with Paul Bremmer
On Tuesday night, I attended a dinner in Chicago with Paul Bremmer. He was doing a speaking engagement to promote his book, My Year in Iraq.
Listening to him speak, I was stunned by the degree to which he was unwilling to acknowledge that anything at all went wrong - it's as if he was saying that our current situation in Iraq - escalating violence, more troop deaths, political instability - is all part of a carefully orchestrated plan on the part of the Bush team. We're exactly where we want to be.
He spent a great deal of time talking about Saddam's cruel regime, pointing out the torture devices, rape rooms and mass graves they uncovered. It was as if to say that all of this was worth getting rid of him. That's a rationale I could get behind, but obviously, it's revisionist history to claim that as the reason put forth for going to Iraq. He barely mentioned the WMD threat at all, except to say that the largest CIA operation ever was on the ground in Iraq searching for them.
Perhaps the most ridiculous moment of the evening came during the question and answer session when an audience member asked him why the US doesn't make energy independence a formal part of its foreign policy; in other words, if we weren't so hooked on Mideast oil, we'd never be in Iraq in the first place. Bremmer was simply shocked, stating that oil had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the war in Iraq, and that the questioner was simply wrong.
I'm not sure what's worse: that Bremmer is so misinformed as to believe this or that he knows it's not true and is just attempting to mislead. The major driving force behind Bin Ladenism, and by extension the terrorist threat, is US presence on Saudi soil. That's not to say that we should simply capitulate and leave Iraq and Saudi Arabia just because Bin Laden wants us to, but it is to say that if we were "energy independent", Iraq would be no more strategic than, say, Africa is, and we would probably not be risking American lives to defend it.
Anyway, that's pretty much all that came out of it, except that his hair is as immovable in person as it seemed on TV. I thought it was the humidity of Iraq, but now I'm pretty sure that he's a claymation character...
Listening to him speak, I was stunned by the degree to which he was unwilling to acknowledge that anything at all went wrong - it's as if he was saying that our current situation in Iraq - escalating violence, more troop deaths, political instability - is all part of a carefully orchestrated plan on the part of the Bush team. We're exactly where we want to be.
He spent a great deal of time talking about Saddam's cruel regime, pointing out the torture devices, rape rooms and mass graves they uncovered. It was as if to say that all of this was worth getting rid of him. That's a rationale I could get behind, but obviously, it's revisionist history to claim that as the reason put forth for going to Iraq. He barely mentioned the WMD threat at all, except to say that the largest CIA operation ever was on the ground in Iraq searching for them.
Perhaps the most ridiculous moment of the evening came during the question and answer session when an audience member asked him why the US doesn't make energy independence a formal part of its foreign policy; in other words, if we weren't so hooked on Mideast oil, we'd never be in Iraq in the first place. Bremmer was simply shocked, stating that oil had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the war in Iraq, and that the questioner was simply wrong.
I'm not sure what's worse: that Bremmer is so misinformed as to believe this or that he knows it's not true and is just attempting to mislead. The major driving force behind Bin Ladenism, and by extension the terrorist threat, is US presence on Saudi soil. That's not to say that we should simply capitulate and leave Iraq and Saudi Arabia just because Bin Laden wants us to, but it is to say that if we were "energy independent", Iraq would be no more strategic than, say, Africa is, and we would probably not be risking American lives to defend it.
Anyway, that's pretty much all that came out of it, except that his hair is as immovable in person as it seemed on TV. I thought it was the humidity of Iraq, but now I'm pretty sure that he's a claymation character...
posted by Bleeding Heart at
11:36 AM
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