Friday, January 12, 2007
Bush unhinged
According to Condi, it's not 'escalation,' it's an 'augmentation.' Just because 68% of the country doesn't think it's a good idea, the decider will keep on deciding, after much deliberation and lengthy consultation with the cooler heads in our government, no doubt.
The writers of Left Behind love to mock diplomacy as the province for effeminate, Francophile boys to prance around behind elaborate protocols and never actually do anything, but I wonder just how much hollering we'll hear over Condi's latest boilerplate from, you know, National Review or something.
(An interesting tidbit: Jonah Goldberg, one of the biggest neocon assholes, is three weeks away from losing his $1000 bet, waged in Febr. 2005 against liberal blogger Juan Cole--who is smart and fluent in Arabic--that in two years, Iraq wouldn't be caught in civil war and both Iraqis and Americans would reach a broad conensus that the US war had been worth it).
It's altogether too tempting to imagine the inside of the president's head. Psychoanalysis comes easy. But seriously--what is going on over there? Against the white noise of 'we're listening to your conversations, 'we open your mail,' 'Jose Padilla...did...something,' and all the thousand other high crimes known and unknown, almost no one's backing his baby anymore--not even a majority in Utah. It doesn't take a genius to know that George H. W. Bush has agonized for years over what point does his intervention become goddamn necessary (but big deal, he's rich and practically dead). Obviously, the newly canonized Gerald Ford (ah, for the days when your president was really, really nice) was holding his tongue till it was a posthumous tongue. Nonetheless, there is still a constellation of true believers--a bipartisan coalition if one counts the Connecticut for Lieberman party.
Is this really supposed to be John McCain's war? Is the man who bussed himself all around the country crowing about integrity going to crucify himself in 2008 by taking on this burden--just to gain access to Bush's vaunted fund-raising club? That's an incredible gamble. That fabled maverick, so utterly desperate to be president, will eat shit straight from the hand of the man who told South Carolina in 2000 that he had a black baby, swinging the primary to Bush. The storied POW, the even-keeled skeptic, straight-talking Arizonan--he's toeing the party line to the point of pure absurdity.
Does anyone think 'winning' is possible? Does the Iraqi civil war have a dynamic where victory is achievable for any side? Iraq is like the Lebanon in 1975: 15 more years of war to go, followed by a painful and turgid peace plus de facto Syrian domination. If Iraq doesn't partition itself, which it should (at least for the fucking Kurds' benefit), it will merely hobble into the next paradigm change of power relations in the Middle East: oillessness. Whenever that is, 2050 or beyond. We've fucked Iraq over fourth-dimensionally.
The scariest thing is the new momentum of the federal government under Bush's charge. With Vice President Cuckoo-Bananas still, against all reason, not having bowed out for (ahem) health concerns even though he's ten times the ineptocrat that Donald Rumsfeld ever was, it's hard to believe we have two years and a week left of this shit. Bush et al. simply do whatever they want; that's the essence of the signing statements and the sweeping assumption of powers: "I can do whatever I want." In the end, Bush is the ultimate rich kid, never having had to be responsible for a single thing. He's a brat. No one has ever told him no, and now he's refigured the parameters of the world's most powerful office precisely so that no one can ever tell him no until January 20, 2009.
And now, in total and complete contravention of prudence and public opinion (in rare alignment) the traitor-baiters are actually condemning more overworked soldiers to die for their catastrophic error. They actually are. People are heading back to Iraq, some of them, for the third time. That's two fewer tours of duty than Dick Cheney's draft deferments. I suspect most of those people aren't heading back willingly, although you can't neglect the myrmidon factor. We're sending more people to die, for no good reason. Making sure that the ones who died already "didn't die in vain" qualifies as a shitty reason.
This is probably what animated so much anti-Nixon vitriol, around 1968-70, before Watergate; people had the sense that, for the first time since 1933, the government broadly did not give a shit and was actually behaving in even more ways contrary to
the country's best interests (to put it mildly). In 2007, still stinging after losing both chambers of Congress, Bush has decided it's a good idea to augment the war by sending more people to Iraq in order to hasten victory, and many of the Republican signers-on to this idea want to deploy more soldiers to make it possible to withdraw them.
The real answer is immediate withdrawal. There is nothing more than can be done for Iraq, because "Iraq" contains too many people bent on killing each other, not enough of which can be blamed on ancient blood feuds among sects to exculpates our blundering naivete for having gone there in the first place. We need to start leaving tomorrow, at the fastest possible speed, slowing only enough so that those physically boarding planes are protected by those who have not yet been lucky enough to leave for home.
The writers of Left Behind love to mock diplomacy as the province for effeminate, Francophile boys to prance around behind elaborate protocols and never actually do anything, but I wonder just how much hollering we'll hear over Condi's latest boilerplate from, you know, National Review or something.
(An interesting tidbit: Jonah Goldberg, one of the biggest neocon assholes, is three weeks away from losing his $1000 bet, waged in Febr. 2005 against liberal blogger Juan Cole--who is smart and fluent in Arabic--that in two years, Iraq wouldn't be caught in civil war and both Iraqis and Americans would reach a broad conensus that the US war had been worth it).
It's altogether too tempting to imagine the inside of the president's head. Psychoanalysis comes easy. But seriously--what is going on over there? Against the white noise of 'we're listening to your conversations, 'we open your mail,' 'Jose Padilla...did...something,' and all the thousand other high crimes known and unknown, almost no one's backing his baby anymore--not even a majority in Utah. It doesn't take a genius to know that George H. W. Bush has agonized for years over what point does his intervention become goddamn necessary (but big deal, he's rich and practically dead). Obviously, the newly canonized Gerald Ford (ah, for the days when your president was really, really nice) was holding his tongue till it was a posthumous tongue. Nonetheless, there is still a constellation of true believers--a bipartisan coalition if one counts the Connecticut for Lieberman party.
Is this really supposed to be John McCain's war? Is the man who bussed himself all around the country crowing about integrity going to crucify himself in 2008 by taking on this burden--just to gain access to Bush's vaunted fund-raising club? That's an incredible gamble. That fabled maverick, so utterly desperate to be president, will eat shit straight from the hand of the man who told South Carolina in 2000 that he had a black baby, swinging the primary to Bush. The storied POW, the even-keeled skeptic, straight-talking Arizonan--he's toeing the party line to the point of pure absurdity.
Does anyone think 'winning' is possible? Does the Iraqi civil war have a dynamic where victory is achievable for any side? Iraq is like the Lebanon in 1975: 15 more years of war to go, followed by a painful and turgid peace plus de facto Syrian domination. If Iraq doesn't partition itself, which it should (at least for the fucking Kurds' benefit), it will merely hobble into the next paradigm change of power relations in the Middle East: oillessness. Whenever that is, 2050 or beyond. We've fucked Iraq over fourth-dimensionally.
The scariest thing is the new momentum of the federal government under Bush's charge. With Vice President Cuckoo-Bananas still, against all reason, not having bowed out for (ahem) health concerns even though he's ten times the ineptocrat that Donald Rumsfeld ever was, it's hard to believe we have two years and a week left of this shit. Bush et al. simply do whatever they want; that's the essence of the signing statements and the sweeping assumption of powers: "I can do whatever I want." In the end, Bush is the ultimate rich kid, never having had to be responsible for a single thing. He's a brat. No one has ever told him no, and now he's refigured the parameters of the world's most powerful office precisely so that no one can ever tell him no until January 20, 2009.
And now, in total and complete contravention of prudence and public opinion (in rare alignment) the traitor-baiters are actually condemning more overworked soldiers to die for their catastrophic error. They actually are. People are heading back to Iraq, some of them, for the third time. That's two fewer tours of duty than Dick Cheney's draft deferments. I suspect most of those people aren't heading back willingly, although you can't neglect the myrmidon factor. We're sending more people to die, for no good reason. Making sure that the ones who died already "didn't die in vain" qualifies as a shitty reason.
This is probably what animated so much anti-Nixon vitriol, around 1968-70, before Watergate; people had the sense that, for the first time since 1933, the government broadly did not give a shit and was actually behaving in even more ways contrary to
the country's best interests (to put it mildly). In 2007, still stinging after losing both chambers of Congress, Bush has decided it's a good idea to augment the war by sending more people to Iraq in order to hasten victory, and many of the Republican signers-on to this idea want to deploy more soldiers to make it possible to withdraw them.
The real answer is immediate withdrawal. There is nothing more than can be done for Iraq, because "Iraq" contains too many people bent on killing each other, not enough of which can be blamed on ancient blood feuds among sects to exculpates our blundering naivete for having gone there in the first place. We need to start leaving tomorrow, at the fastest possible speed, slowing only enough so that those physically boarding planes are protected by those who have not yet been lucky enough to leave for home.
