Whats happening in the trenches in there between the realists and the neocons?
At the top levels, and through September, through December, January, it seems as though the Bush administration doesn’t quite know what it wants to do next. In fact, there’s some exploration of “Well, what about military action in the Sudan?” But certainly the neoconservatives, people like Paul Wolfowitz, have been arguing, “This is not just about Afghanistan; we have to go after states who support terrorism,” by which they mean, quite specifically, and say, quite specifically, Iraq. And so there’s a brief flurry of public coverage of this in September and October of the possibility, and the administration goes ahead with Afghanistan. What people don’t realize is that all they’ve done is put off a decision about what to do on Iraq. And later on, within a couple of months, the administration begins to think again about the possibility of action against Iraq. … These disputes go on all through the end of 2001 and well into the spring, intensifying in the summer of 2002. And by the summ
