Stop giving air and print time to the Neo-Conservative stupidity that got us into this mess

It occurs to me that the Neo-Conservative colleagues of Dick Cheney – the Perles, Rumsfelds, Wolfowitzes, Woolseys, Boltons, Libbys, Feiths, Kristols and Krauthammers -- those who espoused the doctrine that the road to peace in the Middle East runs through Baghdad, are stuck in a giant inconsistency that I have not seen identified before.

A critical element of their dogma is that the first George Bush made a huge mistake not giving support to the Shiite uprising in the South of Iraq, and taking out Saddam Hussein when we had the armed forces in Iraq to do it. So let’s get this straight: if the Neo-Conservatives had had their way, we would have supported the Shiites taking power and driving out Saddam and the Sunni-Baath power-structure. This, obviously, would have meant civil war – at minimum the high-simmering kind civil war we have now if we were trying to occupy the country, but most likely, given the circumstances of a territorial assault by U.S. and Shiite forces advancing on Baghdad from the south, full-blown civil warfare between Sunnis and Shiites. If we were on the side of the Shiites, we might have been able suppress the open civil warfare, but we would have been even less prepared to control the country than we were later, if that is possible. So even if we did provide cover for the Shiites to take control, the simmer of a hand-to-hand combat civil war would have been at the most extreme level.

Under what conceivable scenario could it possibly have been otherwise? Since civil war was an inevitable part of their game plan at that time, where does the Bush crowd now get off saying we must stay in Iraq to prevent civil war between Sunnis and Shiites? These are the people running our foreign policy now. Their misjudgments are truly of historic, epochal proportions. They do not deserve the national platform they still get from CNN and its fellow news channels.