Neo-Decepticons At It Again

Transforming the Middle East, one neocon deception at a time

No, this isn’t a review of the new film sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (worldwide 5 day gross $381 million), in which a race of evil alien robots known as the Decepticons return to earth in an attempt to redeem their former glory.

Rather, it’s a commentary on an op-ed in today’s LA Times written by the guy who replaced the treasonous Scooter Libby in Darth Cheney‘s Little Shop of Horrors, John P. Hannah.

Prior to his elevation to Cheney’s inner national security sanctum, Hannah was a member of the infamous White House Iraq Group, charged with ginning up a case for the invasion of Iraq. Central to that effort  was a presentation to the UN, embodied in a 48 page draft of fabricated WMD evidence so atrocious that Colin Powell immediately placed the whole thing into the shredder. Just how bad it was can be inferred from the alternate “evidence” that Powell did submit — cartoon drawings of mobile bioweapons labs and other props like a little glass vial of faux anthrax to be delivered to America’s shores by a non-existent fleet of Iraqi drones launched from ships at sea.

Hannah was also Cheney’s main liason to Ahmed Chalabi‘s Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi’s main job, for which he was paid an astounding $300,000 per month by the American taxpayer, was to provide Iraqi ex-pats like the notorious “Curveball” willing to lie about Saddam Hussein‘s non-existant WMD operation. But like his Dark Lord, Hannah is not content to go quietly into the night to contemplate the disaster he help unleash in the Middle East. On the eve of the first stage of the Bush negotiated US pullback, removal of combat troops from most of Iraq’s major cities, Hannah casts doubt on President Obama’s strategy, writing:

Although President Obama has largely endorsed the Bush timeline for reducing the U.S. military presence in Iraq, far less clear is the extent to which he has also adopted his predecessor’s appreciation for the importance of achieving America’s strategic goals there…Under Obama, Bush’s commitment to winning in Iraq has all but vanished. Convinced from the start that the war was a mistake (a conviction fortified by the Bush team’s post-invasion bungling), Obama has for years been the salesman in chief for a narrative of failure: Iraq is seen as a colossal disaster — a senseless distraction that drained U.S. resources while alienating the rest of the world. While recognizing a vague obligation to help Iraqis forge a better future, Obama’s bottom line comes through loud and clear: The war was a strategic blunder, and the sooner the U.S. can wash its hands of it and re-focus on our “real” priorities in the Middle East, the better.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Hannah goes on to demonstrate his irony deficient worldview by warning that:

Iraqis listen to his [Obama’s] speeches and hear that withdrawal, not victory, is his highest priority. They see that America appears more concerned with engaging a hegemonic Iran than consolidating a democratic Iraq.

Excuse me? If Hannah was truly worried about “a hegemonic Iran”, he wouldn’t have helped transform what was once a possibility into an all too stark reality by engineering the removal of the one man that had, at and with US bidding and support, successfully kept Iranian expansionism in check, Saddam Hussein.

I imagine that in his current digs as a senior fellow at the AIPAC funded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hannah is busily preparing a case for invading the next country on the Neocon hit list. After all, as a senior member of the Bush Administration once exhorted:

“Real men don’t go to Baghdad, they go to Tehran.”

Is Joseph P. Hannah a real man?

Or is he a Neo-Decepticon?