Repercussions

"I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him -- this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, 'You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.'

"He said, 'Why?' I said, 'For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They're going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there's going to be a massive insurgency.'"

"He said, 'No, no, they'll be glad to see us,'" Lang continued. "This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.'

No, Lang told Wolfowitz, "that's not gonna happen. It's just an impossibility. They're not like that. They don't want to be us."

-via The Washington Note

Wolfowitz was a Team B mutherfucker, that group of know-nothing sad sacks whose job was to invent Soviet Union supervillain scenarios in order to push their various agendas: direct conflict, inflating defense budgets, undermining the CIA. Team B was fantastically wrong about everything. The big question is whether they bought their own bullshit.

From the opening quote it seems that maybe Wolfowitz swallows bullshit for breakfast. Maybe he really thought there were Soviet stealth submarines. It certainly sounds like he believed in our own Reverse Domino Theory, US fairy dust sparking off the Glorious Owners' Revolution. Or maybe he's just good at regurgitating the party line and was signaling to Lang that real expert analysis wouldn't be necessary.

They weren't cherry-picking intelligence. They were cherry-picking stupidity.

And ensuring that the stupidest were given the plum jobs.