From Heroes to Targets-- today on Salon

Just up is an article by Michelle Goldberg on the disastrous fantasies of the neocons about postwar Iraq, which opens

"The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.

The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B."

This reminds me of something I posted before the war about PNAC, which deserves another mention in light of the quagmire. In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott excoriates what he calls "high modernist social engineering" echoing Friedrich Hayek's economic arguments as stated by reviewer Brad deLong,"that the bureaucratic planner with a map does not know best, and can not move humans and their lives around the territory as if on a chessboard to create utopia; that the local, practical knowledge possessed by the person-on-the-spot is important; that the locus of decision-making must remain with those who have the craft to understand the situation; that any system that functions at all must create and maintain a space for those on the spot to use their local, practical knowledge (even if the hierarchs of the system pretend not to notice this flexibility)."

Even though Scott targets mostly leftist Utopian fantasies, his argument applies to the PNAC crowd quite perfectly. Here is a link to deLong's review of Scott:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/seeing_like_a_state.html

and the Amazon.com entry on Scott's book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0300070160/qid=1058562611/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-6282866-5115912?v=glance&s=books&n=507846