Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Tuesdays With Moron

It is incumbent upon every reality-based soul out there to openly and frequently ask the burning question: do these people seriously believe what they're saying?

Bush, speaking on the third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, assured Americans that his administration is pursuing a strategy "that will lead to victory in Iraq," an outcome about which polls show the public is increasingly skeptical.


Throughout the past three years, Bush and Cheney have been either unwilling or unable to even define "victory" in any but the broadest rhetorical talking points. "Standing down as Iraqis stand up" is not a plan, it is less than a bumper-sticker sentiment, without any concrete policy measures to achieve such a bland, vague objective. The factual results are, by all indications, somewhere between piss-poor and miserable. Repeatedly clapping and insisting that they do believe in fairies is not helping. Incessantly blaming the media for not giving the same priority to repainted schools as they do to exploding mosques and wholesale slaughter is proving more and more to be a lame distraction, even to some folks who were previously in good standing in the Kool-Aid Brigade.

Perhaps they have had enough time to seriously consider their own moral cowardice in all this, these self-styled would-be tough guys. After all, the longer this mess goes on, and the worse it gets, it becomes more and more difficult, even for fundamentally dishonest and disingenuous people, to rationalize and justify and obfuscate what one knows deep down inside to be morally reprehensible.

And when their wampeter keeps toddling out with the same feeble rhetoric he's lathered them up with for three years running -- and even disavowing statements that have been part of the public record for quite some time now -- even these fools start to suspect that something's up. There was a time when some of Chimpco's headier fantasies could be brushed away with claims of cynicism or realpolitik. That is no longer the case. When they are using the same tired arguments, and parsing past admissions in an attempt to make reality bend to their will, one is forced to confront that question. Either they are at an unprecedented, truly breathtaking level of cynicism and disingenuousness, or they're flat-out delusional. Take your pick.

Cheney, meanwhile, dismissed assertions made by former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi that the nation is in the throes of civil war. He said Iraq is holding together as a new constitutional democracy even as terrorists are desperately trying to cause its dissolution.


Right. What does Deadeye Dick know about Iraq, that our former CIA asset Allawi does not know about his own country? As I mentioned earlier, you extrapolate the numbers, and it is literally impossible to ignore such daily casualties. Yet they persist in their selective vision, despite all rational indicators regarding Iraq's precipitous slide into civil war.

For a long time after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it made sense to argue that the fighting in Iraq was not a civil war, but a Sunni-led insurgency against the U.S. occupation forces and the series of transitional, interim and “permanent” puppet governments supported by those U.S. forces. For a long while, the majority of those killed in Iraq were either combatants on one side of these battle lines or another, or they were civilian “collateral damage” killed by the United States or who died in spectacular car bombings and other terrorist acts carried out by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi’s religious right. That is no longer the case.

Sometime over the past twelve months—long before the demolition of the Golden Dome in Samarra—that balance shifted dramatically. It might truly be said that the Iraq War became the Iraqi Civil War when the number of those killed in sectarian and ethnic clashes, in death squad activity and in assassinations, torture and executions surpassed the number killed in the war between the United States and the resistance. It’s hard to say exactly when this happened, but it took place last summer, at least, and it has continued to this day.

John Pace, the former United Nations human rights chief in Iraq, might have been announcing the start of the Iraqi Civil War when he declared that as many as 1,000 dead Iraqis per month were turning up in morgues with obvious signs that they had been bound and gagged, tortured and executed.


The central argument of Chimpco's latest charm offensive is to blame the media, of course. This is both asinine and untrue. Such "reasoning" implicitly supposes that if the media either downplayed the violence, or even ignored it altogether, that somehow events would be playing out differently. To be sure, some of the pre-screened supporters on Bush's whistle-stop boilerplate circle jerks seem to actually buy into such a notion. The most charitable way I can put it is that those people are not thinking this through. They are merely hearing what they want to hear, believing what they wanted to believe all along. It's a wish their hearts are making, while their brains are apparently sound asleep.

As always, if the armchair quarterbacks wish to show the proles conclusive proof that the media are being unnecessarily pessimistic about Iraq, then by all means go over and show us all the good stuff. I keep hearing the plaintive wail, "Why won't they show the good we're doing there?" Very well, then, go over there and show the other side of the story. Have another "Truth Tour", maybe this time one where you can leave the Green Zone without full military escort. Because it's such a safe place, thanks to the progress we're making.

Seriously, I'd love to see Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of them do exactly what the keep daring the despised media to do -- get off the hotel balcony and show us the real Iraq. Of course, this despicable trope completely ignores all the journalists from around the world who have been killed or injured trying to do just that. I'd like to see Ingraham give her little smartass lecture to Bob Woodruff, or to the family of Michael Kelly. Really, above and beyond the sheer fatuousness of their arguments, these people are just beneath contempt. They are clutching at last straws, unaware that a few segments of the media are starting to wake up, tiring of the constant abuse from an unpopular preznit and his vile minions, and maybe getting the first signs of backbone.

Meanwhile, if either of these stories are even remotely true, we may be digging ourselves an inescapable hole anyway, with or without a true full-scale civil war.

Iraqi police have accused American troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid last Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers' animals and blew up the house, the document said.

A U.S. military spokesman, Major Tim Keefe, said that the U.S. military has no information to support the allegations and that he had not heard of them before a reporter brought them to his attention Sunday.

....

Accusations that U.S. troops have killed civilians are commonplace in Iraq, though most are judged later to be unfounded or exaggerated. Navy investigators announced last week that they were looking into whether Marines intentionally killed 15 Iraqi civilians - four of them women and five of them children - during fighting last November.

But the report of the killings in the Abu Sifa area of Ishaqi, eight miles north of the city of Balad, is unusual because it originated with Iraqi police and because Iraqi police were willing to attach their names to it.


That the Iraqi police are actually willing to sign off on this formal accusation and push it is huge, regardless of the veracity of the charges. There were bound to be incidents where the Iraqis might cynically try to publicly distance themselves from us, so as to demonstrate some independence. But not on something as awful as this. This is so fucking bad, it's just unforgivable. I hope like hell that there's some twist, that it was set up to make people think we did it. But I'm also old enough to recall the name My Lai. Things happen.

And while much has been made of Bush's implicit admission that we'll still be in Iraq after he's out of office (and hopefully out of our lives for good), all I get from his obnoxious, petulant tone is that someone else gets to clean up the mess he made. And like he has his entire life, he'll escape any real accountability for the damage he's inflicted.

Finally, it's instructive to note that, after all is said and done, that even the vaunted "Axle of Evil" policy is an abject failure. Iran, seeing us next door with our pants around our ankles, is nothing but emboldened. With the Chinese and Russians on their side, they promise to be a thorn in our sides for quite some time. And there's not much we can really do about it. Air strikes, sure. But then they retaliate, and it's on, it's been brought. And there's no guarantees as to how the rest of the world will come down on the issue next time. We have no more credibility; Chimpco has played all their "wolf" cards.

And North Korea is itching to stir up whatever shit it can, now that it has nukes.

North Korea said Tuesday that it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States in its latest threat since being told it must stop its illegal trade activities.
"Our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter (a) possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the North Korea Foreign Ministry said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States."

The ministry also said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat.

"We made nuclear weapons because of a nuclear threat from the United States," the ministry said.


Whatever cakewalk fantasies once existed in regards to Iraq, there have never been any such illusions about North Korea (or Iran, for that matter), even when we were at peak strength. But again, the worst part of it is that we are exposed. Any student of empire knows that the big dog never undertakes any military campaign half-assed, lest he fail and be exposed to all enemies. This is not to say that Iraq would have been successful even with twice the manpower; it still probably wouldn't have. But Rumsfeld insisted on doing it all on the cheap, and fired dissenting voices that, as it turns out, knew much better than he did.

So now they all know the extent and limitations of our military capabilities, and they know how much we've been weakened trying to occupy a country already weakened itself by a decade of sanctions. And with every passing day, as our "leaders" continue to posture and preen and deny reality in a futile attempt to cover their asses, they know the truth about the people running this banana stand. Incompetent, at odds with reality, dangerously delusional, and in constant denial, out of fear that the public might suddenly get wise and send them all home.

But yeah, I hear a few dozen cherry-picked military families are peeved that we don't hear enough of the good stuff. Fine. You pick the story, then, and contrast it with the events that are actually driving the narrative. Rebuilding schools and hospitals is nice, but in the context of daily murder and kidnapping, rather orthogonal to the direction of the overall situation. A responsible leader would know that, and at least plan accordingly, if not come clean once and for all.

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