It is being suggested to us that Anonymous, author of the forthcoming Imperial Hubris, is writing in order to promote a perspective shared by professionals in the intelligence community (from The Guardian: " The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken. "). This perspective is being spun as though it represents yet another disagreement with Bush's foreign policy team by someone who "knows" what he/she is talking about. However, if what we have seen so far reflects a common wisdom within the intelligence community, then the job of fixing American intelligence is bigger even than the pessimists think it is.
Spencer Ackerman quotes Anonymous as saying:
" To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing....Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. … [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world. "
and apparently from Imperial Hubris:
" America is in a war for survival. Not survival in terms of protecting territory, but in terms of keeping the ability to live as we want, not as we must....we can act to preserve our way of life — what Mr. Lincoln said is man’s last best hope for self-government — by engaging in whatever martial behavior is needed. We owe this to ourselves, our heritage and our posterity. We protect none of these by cloaking cowardice with canting words about international comity, civilized norms, and high moral standards. Such words are proper only in a suicide note for the nation. "
This is not realism. It is defeatism. It is a wholesale effort to avoid responsibility and to avoid making difficult choices. This is the cynicism of forward momentum, the damnable suggestion that since we're here, here was inevitable and only pushing the unalterable course to its conclusion will get us through. War may sometimes be necessary, but not genocide.
This path, laid out wide and straight by Anonymous, tacitly supported by members of the US intelligence community, this is the suicide note for our nation.
Posted by Martial