The Thinkers Get IT!

I listened to NPR Sunday Edition with Liane Hansen this morning.

She's really liberal. Not as liberal as Dianne Reems but that's another story.

She had a man on who has written an article for Esquire Magazine about the War in Iraq. His name, Thomas P. M. Barnett. I would be smarter if I had two initials for middle names. But, his conclusions about the Iraq war were right on the money.

He believes despite all the fits and starts that it was the right thing to do. That it was a Big Bang. From the interview:

What the Bush administration basically did by going into Iraq was - the best rationale is really to lay the big bang on the Middle East and set that part of the world down some pathway of change.

And they certainly accomplished that. And the cynic in me says basically the worse Iraq goes, sort of, the better the big bang goes because it's more realistic that Iraq was going to go badly as opposed to well in terms of our expectations and the breakup of Iraq really forces the fights that need to occur in the Middle East now that Saddam is gone and those fights are all going to be tricky. They're going to be overlapping, and there's not going to be an obvious conclusion to it.

globalization is finally penetrating the part of the world to which it hasn't found much purchase in the past. And you, know, when you add those three new billion capitalists in the East, you create impulses. You create the oil boon. You create all sorts of interests in that part of the world that's really discombobulating because these are still fairly traditional societies.

So we got to look at this as a process to be managed where there will be countries that come apart, and there will be countries that rise and fall, and there will be societies that are in some ways completely made over, just like they were in Asia for the last 20 years.

But what we don't have in the Middle East is basically some sort of regional security dialogue, which I would argue is the required diplomatic, political top-cover. We've had this tendency in the Middle East to assume that if we can find, sort, of the perfect peace plan for Palestine versus Israel or if we can find the perfect peace plan now or whatever you want to call the plan - surge - in Iraq, that we can take care of individual problems and on that basis create, sort of, oases of stability in that part of the world.

But what we found in the Middle East over the last 20, 30 years is that whenever there's an ongoing conflict, basically everybody in the region uses it to rough each other over. They take it as a venue for proxy conflict, and that's really, in many ways, what's going on right now in Iraq, which means Iraq can't be separated from everything else. And if you want to fix everything else, in some ways, you got to fix Iraq. And that was what the Iraq Study Group called for.

While I don't hardly agree with everything Mr Barnett said, I do agree with this.

This war was important. We had to fight it. It must be that this part of the world comes into the 20th Century. Ms Hansen is a rampant radical liberal without a lick of sense. So forget what she says.

But listen to the behind the critisizm in the Barnett interview.

The Iraq war is essential and prophetic.

Get on the right track and start seeing reality.