This week's Incredipundit!ry

Larry Johnson on Paul Bremmer's attempt to wash his hands. In one section, Johnson describes how he tried and failed to get Bremmer to meet with one Pat Lang before Bremmer was sent to Iraq.

If Jerry had listened to Pat he could have learned very important things about Iraq. Just one week before Bremer’s named surfaced as the new CPA Administrator, Pat Lang circulated an email (April 23, 2003) commenting on an article in the Washington Post by Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest, U.S. Planners Surprised By Strength of Iraqi Shiites. Pat, referring to Kessler and Priest, wrote:

These two folks have really "cracked the code" on this. I was told several weeks ago by European academic and Intelligence sources that a large scale infiltration of Iranian Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) into Iraq was underway with the ultimate aim of pre-positioning Shia forces for the day when armed resistance against the US may be necessary. I subsequently mentioned this on Wolf Blitzer's "Late Edition" and the "Lehrer Newshour" as well as in a number of radio and newspaper interviews. I mention this because it should be pathetically obvious that if one FORMER intelligence person could know this, then the US government with its vast sources of knowledge should easily have known it. It seems that the government did not, or at least the policy people in the government did not.

Why is that?

The answer lies in a statement that was made to me this morning by a deeply bitter and now alienated Arab World Intelligence expert still serving in the US Government. "Hey," he said, "You can't inform people who already know it all." This man has given up on trying to tell the geo-strategic geniuses now running American foreign policy the hard truths of what the Islamic World is really like. Why? Because they won't listen. They seem to believe that the idiosyncratic cultures of the rest of the world are largely irrelevant and are merely nostalgic fictions dear to the hearts of area "Experts" who are invested in them and who are obstacles to the imposition of a "modern" culture and psyche modeled on that of the United States.

Read The Whole Thing. It becomes clearer by the day that any failures of imagination about the results of invading Iraq were willing failures. It seems that if you have a grasp of "great politics", you don't need to be versed in the particulars of policy. Thanks again, Leo. Or, as Larry put it:

From George Bush to Medal of Freedom winners Jerry Bremer and George Tenet, choices were made where alternative information and expertise were ignored. This deadly combination of arrogance and hubris has produced a policy in Iraq that is killing American soldiers and Iraqi civilians and is weakening U.S. influence and prestige in the Middle East.

Indeed.