Early 2007: State Department Official Blames Failures in Iraq on Neoconservative Ignorance

A State Department official reflects on the Bush administration’s expectation that Iraq would function smoothly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the administration’s complete failure to anticipate an insurgency and the sectarian strife which together have engulfed the country in violence. The official, who chooses to remain anonymous to interviewer Craig Unger, says this all happened because the neoconservatives driving the White House foreign policy know next to nothing about Iraq’s history and culture. “In all the literature they’ve written about Iraq, you will not see anything by them that has anything about the nature of Iraqi society,” the official says. “It was as if that stuff did not exist. Likewise, they did not think about Iraq in the context of the region. They viewed those things as distractions from their larger objectives. That is what was so frustrating about [Brent] Scowcroft (see October 2004) and others who spent a lifetime developing knowledge and expertise to examine the unintended consequences of various policies.” Scowcroft and other “realists” in the administration, most prominently Colin Powell, were derided, mocked, and ultimately driven out of the administration by the neoconservatives, to the detriment of the administration’s Iraq policies. [Unger, 2007, pp. 305-306]