Why the Iraq Attaq?

In The Assassins' Gate, former liberal hawk George Packer writes:

"Why did the United States invade Iraq? It still isn't possible to be sure -- and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq War."

One particularly dumb rationale of the American neoconservatives like Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, who wrote the "Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, was the "everybody move over one theory:"

"Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq."

The notion that the Jordanian royal family would want to leave semi-civilized Jordan for barbaric Iraq, where their relatives were torn limb from limb in 1958, beggars the imagination. But Wurmser, who in September 2003 was appointed Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser and whose Israeli-born wife is founder of MEMRI, had it all worked out in his 1996 strategy paper for Netanyahu:

"Instead of retreating from occupied lands in exchange for dubious promises of peace, Wurmser wrote, Israel should take the fight to the Palestinians and their Arab backers and create a realignment of forces in the Middle East that would guarantee Israel's security. Iraq played a central, if utterly fanciful, role in this scenario. The paper dreamed of restoring the Hashemite family of Jordan (deposed from the Iraqi throne in 1958, the year of the republican coup and Chalabi's departure) to rule in Baghdad. The monarchy, in turn, despite being Sunni Muslim, would win over Iraq's Shia because 'the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendant of which -- in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows -- is King Hussein.' With Shiite support, the newly enthroned Hashemites 'could use their influence over Najaf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.' Then the Palestinians, isolated and alone, would have to accept Israeli demands." ...

Netanyahu, who has to live in the real Middle East, apparently paid little attention to the neocons' Rube Goldberg scheme. In general, the actual Likudists in Israel, as opposed to their auxiliary in Washington, never cared all that much about Iraq. Their attention was focused on Syria and Iran instead.

But that rebuff didn't stop the Washington neocons:

"Wurmser elaborated the theory in his 1999 book Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, published by the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank where he was a scholar. The overthrow of Saddam would destabilize both Syria and Iran, isolate Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and realign the entire Middle East so that -- although this was never spelled out, as if the author feared making himself too clear -- Israel would no longer need to negotiate with the Palestinians over the occupied territories. Tyranny's Ally, with an introduction by Richard Perle and acknowledgments to Perle, Chalabi, Feith, [Bernard] Lewis, and several other intellectuals of the Iraq War, is a strange and revealing book. It reads as if a graduate student were feverishly trying to apply half-digested concepts he'd learned in a class with Leo Strauss to subject matter he'd learned in a class with Bernard Lewis. ... Wurmser wanted to return Iraq to traditional values, especially to Shiite religious tradition (about which he knew almost nothing)."

Why is Wurmser still employed in Cheney's office? Doesn't America deserve less ludicrous foreign policy advisors than these guys? Well, perhaps we just get the quality of advice we deserve, but do we have to get it quite so good and hard?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer