This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

We told you so:

Eliot Cohen loses optimism

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appointed Eliot Cohen as State Department Counselor on March 7.(1) Cohen is known as the "most influential neoconservative in academe,"(2) as a teacher of military politics and history.

When Cohen started teaching at Harvard in 1982, MIM's predecessors the RADACADS tangled with him ever so slightly. A local news story arose on the tangle, but RADACADS and MIM thereafter disappointed those at Harvard who were looking for more fireworks.

Today, Cohen admits that his neo-conservative "Project for a New American Century" and the Iraq project in particular failed:

"Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, yet another Defense Policy Board member and longtime advocate of ousting Saddam Hussein, is even more pessimistic: 'People sometimes ask me, 'If you knew then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of the war?' Usually they're thinking about the W.M.D. stuff. My response is that the thing I know now that I did not know then is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this. I'm pretty grim. I think we're heading for a very dark world, because the long- term consequences of this are very large, not just for Iraq, not just for the region, but globally—for our reputation, for what the Iranians do, all kinds of stuff.'"(3)
Sorry, Eliot Cohen, when "incompetence" is seen in a pattern in a project as large as the invasion of Iraq, the proper terminology would be something like what MIM said:
"Chesler never shows once any success in implementing great feminist change by the hands of her favorite revolutionary vehicle, the U.$. military. Yet the whole world knows that the U.$. military has had great success killing prisoners, raping boys and spreading commercial pornography--including in places in Iraq where there was none.
"The failure of the united $tates to bring progressive gender change to the world shows what MIM has said for a long time, that u.$. imperialism is decadent, not progressive. Some wimmin may admit that the united $tates is decadent and exploitative and still wonder if u.$. soldiers can bring positive gender change. For these doubters, we point to the gender aristocracy. Lynndie England is the final nail in the coffin for any fantasy about U.$.-led feminist revolution."(4)
It's not just "incompetence" of select individuals. There is a whole lack of a vehicle of thousands and millions for change when we are talking about the U.$. military.

Cohen does not agree. He sees altruistic people willing to join the military, people MIM would say should join a vanguard party:

"You have loads of Americans, and I get many of them as my students, who are quite self-sacrificing and quite willing to go off into all kinds of places. One of my students got interested in strategic studies, joined the Army, served in Iraq, came back, and then joined the U.S. Institute of Peace and set up their first country office there—in Iraq. Many Americans would be more than happy to go over to Iraq and expose themselves to shot and shell to do good. It is not a question of a spirit of self-sacrifice. . . . soldiers make a point of clearing away all the burned-out vehicles off the road, so that there was a sense of peace, of normalcy; making contacts with the local notables—all that sort of stuff. The idea that Americans are constitutionally incapable of this is just wrong."(5)

One of Cohen's own colleagues has brought him to task on the nature of the military. Karen Kwiatkowski says that military people are promoted for following orders, which is why Cohen's hopes for well-educated military people are misplaced.(6) Cohen wants to deny that soldiers are "constitutionally incapable" of bringing real aid to Iraq and that the whole problem is leadership, but Kwiatkowski asks him what world of leadership he lives in. The truth is that there is no vehicle and also no leadership for that vehicle.

One last point--Cohen points to Japan and Germany as examples where the United $tates brought change by military means. At that time, FDR was president. The kind of State Department officials in place were those to be red-baited a few years later by Joe McCarthy, and decades later by Ann Coulter. The united $tates carried out land reform and improvement of the conditions of wimmin in Japan. Today, the united $tates is merely trying to implement a backward production-sharing oil agreement in Iraq. The most insight that the united $tates shows today is that there are Kurds who can be supported for their own cause. The Japan case involved disempowering landed classes that brought about Japan's military adventures. Today there is no commonality of interest between the united $tates and local people analogous to bringing the pacifist sectors of Japan into power, because the united $tates aims at contracts and oil for itself. The u.$. objective in Japan was to defang the ruling class, and that was done best by agrarian revolution that cleared the way for further industrial development in Japan. So there is no U.$. military vehicle and there is no Iraqi vehicle for change that the united $tates is working with today.

The lesson is clear: disagree with MIM, fail to realize you are wrong and 25 years later you and your kind could be bringing about a "a very dark world." Thanks, Cohen, "very dark world" we will take to mean "Third World dominated." Your fear is our hope.

Notes:
1. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2007/mar/81338.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_A._Cohen
3. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/01/neocons200701?currentPage=2
4. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/gender/iwd06j.html
5. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20070312-eliot-cohen-military-theory-iraq-vietnam-antietam-guerrilla-warfare-nation-building-winston-churchill-military-history-condoleezza-rice.shtml
6. http://militaryweek.com/columns/withoutreservation.php?id=25