Tomgram: Mark Danner, How a War of Unbound Fantasies Happened
From fantasies come consequences caught, in the case of Iraq, by the following headline from the Houston Chronicle, "At least 700 Iraqis die in 8 days of unrelenting violence." ("They've been beheaded, tortured and blown up while looking for work. They've been shot, kidnapped and felled by mortars.") Think of this as George W. Bush's Iraq. Mark Danner, one of our most incisive writers on Bush's war, steps back in this moment that he calls "the time of solutions" to consider just how we got from the soaring rhetoric (not to speak of the lies and manipulations) of the Bush administration, from those planet-encompassing dreams of domination, to the most singularly sordid situation imaginable -- with the possibility of worse still ahead.
This is certainly one of the longest pieces the New York Review of Books has ever run in a single issue. (It will appear in the December 21st issue, soon on the newsstands.) It won't even fit in the Tomdispatch "shell" and so I'm proud to post it, with the kind permission of the editors of the New York Review of Books, as an instant two-part piece. Most of you will be breaking for Thanksgiving. So now you have your assignment for the extended weekend. I couldn't send along a better journalist -- or writer -- as company.
Tomdispatch.com will return on Monday afternoon, November 27th, with a week of genuine surprises, part of an explosive special book project long underway at the site. Look for it. Tom
Iraq: The War of the Imagination
By Mark Danner[This piece, which appears in the December 21, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books, is posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]
"Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end." -- George F. Kennan, September 26, 2002
"I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq?... Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years." -- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, August 13, 2006
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