I’ve gotten a lot of response to my article (“Practice to Deceive“) in the new issue of The Washington Monthly. But the most interesting response has been the lack of response or criticism from the main advocates of regime change in Iraq. I can’t say that I’ve received a lot of plaudits or thank yous. But it confirms a point I made on a radio show yesterday: there’s really no denying any of this because it’s 
really an open secret, if it’s even a secret at all. It’s been discussed and canvassed and argued over in The Weekly Standard, The National Review and various other publications.
In Los Angeles on Wednesday Jim Woolsey, one of the top regime change advocates, called this effort “this fourth world war [which], I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War.” It’s a war, he said, against the mullahs of Iran, the “fascists” in Iraq and Syria and al Qaida. Addressing the Saudis and Hosni Mubarak, he said “We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you — the Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family — most fear: We’re on the side of your own people.”
Jim Woolsey is currently in line for a top post in the American occupation government.
This afternoon I’m reading Stanley Kurtz’s “Democratic Imperialism: A Blueprint” in the new issue of Policy Review. As I noted in the article, there are a number of different flavors of our would-be imperial project in the Arab world. And Kurtz’s isn’t exactly the same as the one I outlined in the Monthly. But it’s part of the same conversation.
I first got a sense of this larger program when I wrote my first article on the Iraq issue (“Bomb Saddam?“) but I got the idea to write the new article when I was at a panel discussion a couple months ago and one of the presenters used the phrase “Middle East reform.” The phrase rolled off his lips as though it required little explanation. And what he meant was pretty much what the phrase sounded like: the process of reforming the Middle East much as one might reform welfare or some institution that had fallen on hard times. He didn’t underestimate the difficulty of doing so, but was convinced that America’s security depended on it.
One point that remains implicit in the Monthly article is that there’s not that much deception among many of the people who’ve formulated this idea for launching an imperial project in the Middle East. The deception lies with the public propagandists and those in the administration who’ve worked to implement the plan without giving the public much of a sense of what they’re up to.
