A strange thing happened on the way to the war. - Karen Kwiatkowski

[Dirty Hippie]

Part 3 of a three part series. I've read elsewhere she has a book coming out. This article is from The American Conservative. Interesting viewpoint form a conservative former analyst at the Pentagon.

...
As the winter of 2002 approached, I was increasingly amazed at the success of the propaganda campaign being waged by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and neoconservative mouthpieces at the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal. I speculated about the necessity but unlikelihood of a Phil-Dick-style minority report on the grandiose Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney vision of some future Middle East where peace, love, and democracy are brought about by pre-emptive war and military occupation.
...

http://www.amconmag.com/1_19_04/article1.html

Part one can be viewed here:
http://www.amconmag.com/12_1_03/feature.html

Part two was not posted on the web.

[reprehensor]

1. NICE find!

Give yourself a pat on the back!

[BigLed]

2. kick

this really should be considered a must read. The lady writes well and has a sense of humor about herself. And in American Conservative.

Wow.

[RainDog]

3. I can't either of the links to work

maybe it's just me..

[chelaque liberal]

4. Same article on truthout today-must read for everyone

In my study of the neoconservatives, it was easy to find out whom in Washington they liked and whom they didn’t. They liked most of the Heritage Foundation and all of the American Enterprise Institute. They liked writers Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol. To find out whom they didn’t like, no research was required. All I had to do was walk the corridors and attend staff meetings. There were several shared prerequisites to get on the Neoconservative List of Major Despicable People, and in spite of the rhetoric hurled against these enemies of the state, most really weren’t Rodents of Unusual Size. Most, in fact, were retired from a branch of the military with a star or two or four on their shoulders. All could and did rationally argue the many illogical points in the neoconservative strategy of offensive democracy—guys like Brent Scowcroft, Barry McCaffrey, Anthony Zinni, and Colin Powell.

I was present at a staff meeting when Deputy Undersecretary Bill Luti called General Zinni a traitor. At another time, I discussed with a political appointee the service being rendered by Colin Powell in the early winter and was told the best service he could offer would be to quit. I heard in another staff meeting a derogatory story about a little Tommy Fargo who was acting up. Little Tommy was, of course, Commander, Pacific Forces, Admiral Fargo. This was shared with the rest of us as a Bill Luti lesson in civilian control of the military. It was certainly not civil or controlled, but the message was crystal

[RainDog]

5. I was able to read it yesterday

and it's a powerful, powerful essay.

Between this woman and O'Neill-- what more does it take to get the press to start doing its job, instead of playing spinmeister?

The part where Zinni is called a traitor is shocking, to say the least, coming from a bunch of chicken hawk nobodies.

If I were Zinni, I don't know if I could have kept my wits. I would have been seriously tempted to knock some sense into that person.

I guess it's like a professional boxer, though...you don't take pot shots at idiots.

[RainDog]

6. interesting comment from the first part-

At the end of the summer of 2002, new space had been found upstairs on the fifth floor for an “expanded Iraq desk.” It would be called the Office of Special Plans. We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained, and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment. We were also told that one of the products of this office would be talking points that all desk officers would use verbatim in the preparation of their background documents.

About that same time, my education on the history and generation of the neoconservative movement had completed its first stage. I now understood that neoconservatism was both unhistorical and based on the organizing construct of “permanent revolution.” I had studied the role played by hawkish former Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-Wash.) and the neoconservative drift of formerly traditional magazines like National Review and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. I had observed that many of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon not only had limited military experience, if any at all,

------>but they also advocated theories of war that struck me as rejections of classical liberalism, natural law, and **constitutional strictures. **

More than that, the pressure of the intelligence community to conform, the rejection of it when it failed to produce intelligence suitable for supporting the “Iraq is an imminent threat to the United States” agenda, and the amazing things I was hearing in both Bush and Cheney speeches told me that

----->not only do neoconservatives hold a theory based on ideas not embraced by the American mainstream, but they also have a collective contempt for fact.

By August, I was morally and intellectually frustrated by my powerlessness against what increasingly appeared to be a philosophical hijacking of the Pentagon. Indeed, I had sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but perhaps we were never really expected to take it all that seriously …    

[young_at_heart]

7. WOW!!

How can we get Republicans to read this? More and more people are coming forward and telling about this warped administration. The more I read the more I find myself angry at the decent GOP senators and reps for going along with these horrific schemes.