Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Death and Destruction
McCain lies on Meet the Press. I really tire of this bullshit. Every major poll for six months in this country has said the same thing: the majority of people in this country want a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, and they want it within a year or so. McCain goes on a major news program and just says that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. There is no way he could just be mistaken. Every major poll in America has said the same thing for six months.
Incompetence, waste, and broken promises in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Is this surprising from the president who trumpeted the No Child Left Behind Act and then abandoned it?
An Iraq timeline. Ahhh, the old quote from Rumsfeld is great: “stuff happens.”
The administration never fearmongers. But what will happen if we don’t follow the president’s plan for Iraq? “death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable,” according to White House strategic initiatives director Peter H. Wehner.
I actually laughed out loud when I read that. I think quite a bit of death and destruction is “imaginable.” I think America spent 40 years in the shadow of death and destruction that might have plausibly wiped out life on Earth as we know it. I also know that there is a greater chance that a meteor will impact the Earth and wipe out continents than terrorists. I know that whatever happens in Iraq, one of a half-dozen nations around the world in utter chaos that I could name off the top of my head, the result will be something that has happened many, many times before in the history of the Earth, and, sadly, will happen again.
This concept that the US can’t leave a country is chaos because it will threaten the US is quite unique to Iraq. Successive US administrations (including this one) have ignored dozens of African countries over the past couple of generations as they have dissolved into civil war and anarchy, including, currently, the Congo, whose civil war has killed millions of people. NATO forces are currently fighting an uphill battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Sectarian violence continually wracks Pakistan and Sri Lanka and East Timor and the Sudan and Somalia, violence involving “islamofascists.” And in the countries of Egypt and Pakistan, countries with “stable” governments, terrorism is a regular occurrence. It seems to be forgotten within the administration that all but one of the September 11th hijackers was from Saudi Arabia, which is also where al Qaeda got the bulk of its donations from. In fact, the ties between Saudi Arabia and terrorists like al Qaeda are massive and well documented.
You won’t see Saudi Arabia attracting the same scrutiny from the administration as Iraq or Iran, though. They are an “ally.” And you won’t see the US invade Pakistan. Nor will administration officials hysterically claim that unless stability is restored to Somalia the result will be “death and destruction on a scale that is almost unimaginable.”
Somalia has no oil, and neither do any of the other countries except Saudi Arabia, whose government has been friendly to US interests for decades. Saddam Hussein regularly thumbed his nose at the US, along with Ahmadinejad. Their countries were no greater hosts to terrorism than Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. The difference was that their leaders were hostile to US interests in the region, interests that have traditionally revolved around oil and protecting Israel.
I’m sure Musharraf in Pakistan and the princes of Saudi Arabia make some effort to cooperate with US anti-terrorism efforts, but they have a lot more work to do than anybody else. And unstable nations that are havens for militants exist all throughout the Middle East and the world. Iraq is not unique. You would have trouble telling that to the administration, though.
Israel again.
David Sirota has an excellent piece about the revulsion many in Washington have regarding the people of the United States expressing their distaste for many in Washington. The revulsion usually comes in the form of a statement along the lines of a Nixonesque appeal to the silent majority who for some reason aren’t voting. Or an assertion that the voters are illegitimate. David Brooks, the conservative propagandist with the friendly face, who said that "Polarized primary voters shouldn't be allowed to define the choices in American politics.” See? Their polarized. Totally illegitimate. Or Peter Beinart of the New Republic, who praised the DLC because "The DLC remains an organization of politicians that believes the less beholden politicians are to grassroots activists, the better they will represent voters as a whole.” Absolutely. Better to be beholden to corporate interests. Better to govern by polls of the “voters as a whole,” polls that say that a majority of people want to get out of Iraq in a year or so and enact universal single-payer healthcare and spend less money on the military and more on education, because God knows that’s what the DLC stands for.
Conrad Burns speaks for the administration when he says that "the U.S. must show 'great patience and resolve' and stay in Iraq even if public support for the war continues to erode." Of course. What right do the people of the United States have to determine how long we stay in Iraq? We must be governed by noble leaders, who see further and better than us, and who can spend our taxpayer dollars and the lives of our sons and daughters until they determine it is not necessary anymore.
The New Republic is on a roll. Ryan Lizza writes that YouTube’s ability to broadcast politician’s public statements directly to the people might not be such a good thing. No one gets to edit their comments, so all the spontaneity is gone. Politicians are now actually afraid to shoot their mouths off without consideration, or to say one thing one day and another thing the next.
Driftglass has a good “Sunday Morning Coming Down” post up. Highlighted are the ridiculous comments of Joementum, one and only candidate of the Bullshit Moose Party. The war in Iraq isn’t a civil war because the army and the government are united, according to Joe. Of course, the army and the government were united in Guatemala and El Salvador’s civil wars in the eighties and no one in Washington or anywhere else doubted that there were actually civil wars that were going on in those countries, with death rates that were actually less than that of Iraq’s if the current year’s death rates keep going. Joe was a freshly-elected senator in Washington in the eighties who actually participated in the discussions as to whether to send aid to the blood-soaked military governments of those countries. Joe is actually unaware of this, as he has blacked out all memories of the eighties and all civil wars, from the Boer War to the Indonesian civil war of the 1960s, that involved a united government and military either slaughtering its own people or being powerless to stop its people from slaughtering each other. Joe has also blacked out the civil wars of Somalia in the 1980s and the current civil war in the Congo where the military and civilian forces were united but unable to control
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 7:34 AM 
