Cohen: No Moral Qualms Over Slaughtering Iraqis

By Kurt Nimmo
Dec. 02, 2006

I want to be nice to Richard Cohen, op-ed regular for the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, because he seems so harmless, even innocuous.

But with his November 21 installment, it is obvious he is minor neocon, even if he does not have the right stuff, that is to say the requisite moral depravity, the sociopathic personality. Instead, Mr. Cohen is a fool—not an idiot or moron, mind you, because imbeciles usually don’t make it on the pages of the Washington Post, but one easily hornswoggled by incessant and irrational propaganda.

According to Cohen, the “Vietnam War was morally correct” because “the communists were awful people,” in other words it was not up to the Vietnamese to decide if communism was awful, it was up to Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, Westmoreland, and the rest. Cohen does not mention the bankrupt morality of slaughtering three million Indochinese, poisoning them with Agent Orange and other chemicals, or rendering their country into a nightmarish wasteland.

As a brainwash victim of Hunter College, NYU, and Columbia, Cohen has the required self-centered pragmatism of the sort that ultimately chews away at his wishy-washy and contradictory convictions. “It was only later, when I myself was in the Army,” Cohen writes, “that I deemed the war not worth killing or dying for. By then I … no longer felt it was winnable, and I did not want to lose my life so that somehow defeat could be managed more elegantly.” Richard wasn’t getting his ass shot off for yellow skinned primitives.

Note: it was not immorality and arrogance, the hubris of empire, that nettled Cohen, but rather the inelegance of the management team. It is much the same now with Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.

Thus, when the neocon “war” (invasion and occupation) of Iraq rolled around, Cohen “had no moral qualms” about killing thousands of Iraqis, decimating civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and even mosques, because “Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat—and not just a theoretical one—to Israel.”

Of course, this last bit is the real problem, never mind Iraq was so enervated after more than a decade of brutal sanctions, its weapons of mass destruction swept out years before—weapons blithely sold to Saddam by the United States and Europe, mostly to kill Iranians—that it possessed absolutely no capacity to threaten Israel and only overran dinky Kuwait, a corrupt monarchy with a population of less than three million, originally carved off Mesopotamia by the Brits, after U.S. diplomat April Glaspie gave Saddam a nod and wink. Moreover, for Cohen and a lot of Israel-supporting Jews, it really is sincerely irksome Saddam paid a stipend to Palestinian families suffering losses in the struggle against the Israeli state. As for Saddam’s invasion of Iran—well, that was just swell for the United States and Israel, nothing could be better than Muslims killing each other.

“If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war—silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America,” although for some reason the very immorality of invading a sovereign nation, killing upward to 650,000 of its citizens, poisoning its land, water, and air with depleted uranium for the next few billion years does not enter into the equation.

Indeed, there is “rottenness” at the very spiritual core of a country that engages in nuclear warfare against babies and grandmothers. Richard apparently is unable to comprehend this, or suffers from the same sociopathic disease the neocons suffer from, although, as stated above, I don’t think he possesses the sort of required viciousness. He is, simply put, confused, or has worn Israel First blinders so long he is unable to tell the ace of spades from a joker.

“We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing,” Richard continues. “In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing—the fighting—were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.”

I’m beginning to change my mind. Maybe Cohen is a neocon—a soft-brained, addled, not quite right version of a “liberal” neocon, a Nancy Pelosi Democrat sort of neocon. Only such a person can entertain the absurdity that the violence unleashed against the people of Iraq is “therapeutic.” Such violence, for instance in Fallujah, where chemical weapons were employed, is hardly “prudent,” and is in fact akin to the sort of war crimes committed by the Nazis.

If the United States has “the power to change things for the better,” why is it always changing things for the worse in places such as Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, East Timor, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Panama, El Salvador, Yugoslavia, and, once again most recently, Haiti? Like the garden variety neocon, Cohen is either ignorant of history or has decided to ignore the dark side, preferring the amnesia of feel-good propaganda.

But then, I almost forgot, he does work for the CIA’s favorite newspaper.

As an upper middle class snob and intellectual ne’er-do-well, Richard fails to notice that most of the “volunteers” in the U.S. military are there as a result of the poverty draft, that is to say patriotism came in second to the idea that the government might provide them with an education and a way out of Chicago’s Southside or Dogpatch. Of course, chances are many of them will not live long enough to collect on the promise.

Naturally, just like think tank bound chicken hawk neocons, Richard Cohen is disillusioned with the Iraq occupation. “As with Vietnam, we are fighting now merely not to lose—to avoid a full-fledged civil war (it’s coming anyway) or to keep the country together, something like that. But not for victory. Not for democracy. All this talk of the Iraqis doing more on their own behalf is Vietnamization in the desert rather than the jungle.”

Yes, indeedy, Richard, a “civil war” is coming, or is rather in progress—and it was planned that way by the neocons, your spiritual and moral brothers in arms, or more accurately brothers behind word processors and perched atop speech lecterns.

It was a “civil war” cooked up in Israel, an idea unleashed like a contagion in the Pentagon by Israel First neocons who schemed and plotted as analysts for Bibi Netanyahu, a primary Likud Jabotinskyite, dedicated to ethnic cleansing.

As irremediable and rabid Arab haters, it makes a sort of demented sense the Israelis and the quisling neocons believe the Iraqis cannot do “more on their own behalf,” never mind the Iraqi people were doing much better before the “war,” even with years of debilitating sanctions and the tinpot dictator Saddam, a former CIA asset, lavishly armed by Reagan and Bush the elder, that is until he became more useful as a foil, a dupe, just another useful idiot, albeit a vicious and murderous useful idiot. Arab nationalists, even insincere ones, are bad karma for the Jewish state, so it stands to reason they will go down, especially with Israel and AIPAC driving foreign policy in the United States.

Richard Cohen demonstrates there is little of substantial difference between the Republican version of neocon and the Democrat neocon lite version. Cohen is all for slaughtering Iraqis—and down the road, Iranians and Syrians.

He simply wants a new management team, convinced Bush has fallen into the Vietnamization trap, attempting to allow the Iraqis, or badly vetted Iraqis, to kill their own at the behest of Israel and the neocons with carpetbagging multinationals rushing in to pick up the profitable pieces.












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