Blast from the idiot past

I've been pounding away on a lengthy article, distracting myself from the daily trivialities that US media coverage provides their readers/viewers. A brief break from the clueless press bumpkins, indulging as they are the latest White House evidentiary fantasies in the preparation of America for the next attack, had me bump into our old friend Paul Wolfowitz. Remember those halcyon days of neoconservative certitude? Well, those haven't really gone away; they're still full of it; certitude, that is. It's just that now, many more people are highly suspicious of them.

And rightly so. Iraq is a cauldron and Bush is arguing for -- indeed sending --a few more troops there in one final push to presumably bring things under control. No one thinks this will work, either because a military solution does not exist or because 20,000 troops aren't enough to change anything on the ground. The only ones who want to "give it a chance" are neocon clowns like Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol who have revised their troop surge number so many times, it seems any number would satisfy them so long as it carried the "more is better" seal of approval. First it was 50,000, 35,000, then 30,00 and then, when it was clear that the military would barely be able to muster 20,000 troops, well, that was fine, too.

Given the arguments in either direction, this now infamous Wolfowitz quote popped out at me. Ahhh, those pre-invasion days of glory, destiny and inconceivability:

There has been a good deal of comment - some of it quite outlandish - about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army - hard to imagine.

Hard to conceive, indeed, when you have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

This response was in reference to General Shinseki's earlier "outlandish comments." Now, I'm not completely sure of this, but I feel confident in saying that US Army Chief of Staff is not a position one assumes by being "outlandish." It is part of normative military understanding that an occupying force must necessarily be far larger than an invasion force. Unless, of course, one is expecting rose petal parades, in which case, one ought to be able to waltz in wearing a tutu.

Given the other wild imaginings the neocons had, I wonder if Wolfowitz ever considered doing that?