THE IRAQ PARADOX….I think it’s worth highlighting one quote from the Seymour Hersh article I talked about in the previous post. Here’s what one of Hersh’s sources said about the interrogation program put into place at Abu Ghraib last year:
So [Cambone] pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it?s working. We?re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white [i.e., non-covert] world. We?re getting good stuff.
Before Cambone “pulled the switch” we weren’t getting any good information. After he did, we were. In other words, the program worked.
This is the circle that seems impossible to square in Iraq: the only way to keep control is to use a level of brutality that (a) Americans are unwilling to tolerate and (b) merely fuels further resentment from Iraqis when they learn about it, which they inevitably will since, after all, it’s being used against Iraqis.
The neocons who were so eager to prove that war could bring democracy to Iraq seem unwilling to address this paradox. It’s about time they started.
