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Pygmalion, Neocon-Style
by Karen Kwiatkowski
God love him, Rummy is a character! I almost broke out into song! Well, I was already chuckling to read that Alan Greenspan had apparently consulted LewRockwell.com and discovered that the social security project was just another big fat federal tax on top of all the others. Who knew? But back to the Kazakhs. The LA Times reports "Rumsfeld sought to compare Kazakhstan, which willingly dismantled its nuclear arsenal years ago, with Iraq – despite the fact that the latter did not possess nuclear weapons." Now, I don’t know what the LA Times is trying to say, but what in the heck does having nuclear weapons have to do with it? The key word here is "willingly." Sure, you might think that "nuclear weapons," or "arsenal," or "dismantle" are the operative expressions, but of course, you’d be wrong. Like Ahmed Chalabi says, finding time between getting US contracts for himself and his relatives, and politicking for a place in the American puppet government in Baghdad, "What was said before is not important." Chalabi, if I may interpret, means to say that words and facts have no intrinsic value, but only instrumental value, as a means to an end. Words don’t have to mean anything, and facts exist only to be described in such a way to ensure we get what we want. For neocons and other pre-logic humans, getting what one wants is the only thing that matters. In fact, like three-year-olds, neocon "thought processes are characterized by great awareness; yet these islands of sophistication exist in a sea of uncertainty. Children during this period still understand relatively little about the world in which they live and have little or no control over it. They are prone to fears and they combat their growing self-awareness of being small by wishful, magical thinking. Hanging around people like this, and getting his policy advice from them, it’s no wonder Secretary Higgins, er, Rumsfeld is often confused about what we know, don’t know, think we know, think we don’t know, and know we don’t think we know. Don’t get me started with what we know now, and what we now know we don’t know. But back to My Fair Country, Iraq as it were. Why can’t Iraq be more like Kazakhstan, indeed? For example, as in Kazakhstan, why can’t Baghdad build a square building and Chalabi-style, call it "the Pentagon," after the great five-sided dominator of all that we survey? That would not only be a great place for the new US Forces, Iraq commander to sit, it would demonstrate a suitable fawning deference as well! And the Kazakh President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev "dismantled with fervor." I truly think, that to avoid being on the pointy end of the U.S. spear, attitude is everything. Saddam simply had a bad attitude. Posing as still harboring weapons just to scare people, trash talking equally both the Likud vision and bin Laden’s caliphate dreams, switching to the euro, all these actions showed Saddam to be a dirty faced little wretch, brash and cocky with a really bad accent. Kind of like Eliza Doolittle. President Nazarbayev provides another model, one that Secretary Higgins likes a lot for potentially oil and gas rich regional presidencies. Naz, if I may call him that, served as Communist Party First Secretary and Chairman of the Supreme Council through 1989 to 1990, then was elected by the liberated and freedom loving people of Kazakhstan by a margin of 98.7%. In 1995, the presidency was extended for five more years by a popular referendum, and in 1999, he ran again for president and was again elected. That time, only 80% of the votes were cast for the decade-long incumbent, but still a pretty good showing, don’t you think? And Nazarbayev is one of the few Muslim presidents who is actively contributing to the coalition of the willing, in the vast liberation and occupation project that is Iraq today. He is maintaining a presence of 27 Kazakh mine-clearing engineers. What a guy! Hey, I have an idea! Why can’t we send 27 engineers to Iraq and call it even! The neoconservatives running our foreign policy in Iraq need a few more like Nazarbayev. The right attitude. The right government and presentation. The right kind of cooperation. My goodness, a man could fall in love with a country like that! And unlike in Iraq, you don’t hear Kazakhs singing with Liza,
Not yet, anyway. But isn’t neoconservative foreign policy loverly!
Karen Kwiatkowski [send her mail] is a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She now lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley, and writes a bi-weekly column on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com. Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
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February
27, 2004
