From Ed West’s The Wrong Side of History:
Iraq was all about blood
What explains the greatest western foreign policy disaster since 1204?Ed West
Mar 7This month marks the 20th anniversary of the greatest western foreign policy disaster since the Fourth Crusade. It was the pre-eminent modern-day example of folly, driven by wishful thinking, utopianism and a lack of interest in history and how human societies differ. This was mostly carried out by good people, including our own Tony Blair, and promoted by thoughtful and humanitarian commentators who thought they were making the world a better place.
The White House regime which brought chaos and misery to Iraq were most of all entranced by The Weekly Standard, the now-defunct magazine most associated with neoconservative foreign policy. Had any of them read The American Conservative instead, they might have avoided the whole tragedy. In particular they ought have read Steve Sailer’s ‘the Cousin Marriage Conundrum’, printed in the run-up to the invasion and in which the author made a seemingly curious argument for why nation-building in Iraq would fail — its high rates of cousin marriage.
Pointing out that between 46 and 53 percent of Iraqis who married did so to first or second cousins, Sailer wrote that: ‘By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges’, cousin marriage ‘makes the development of civil society more difficult’. The neocon dream of jumpstarting democracy was therefore clearly doomed to failure.
