Squirmy Iraq

Yeah, Iraq is a big subject, with lots of folks commenting. This morning's drive brought a whole new torrent of bad Iraq news, what with Katrina all completely and totally taken care of and squared away and put aside and diligently solved and funded with Dubya's $200 billion on the way and trucks full of goodies being taken by state and city workers for themselves. But I digress.

Problems in Basra, with the Brits in combat with both the local populace and the local police. Shiites killing each other, and then briefly teaming up to have it out with the Brits and other occupiers. Tall Afar all a mess with the more and more bad guys infiltrating and setting up insurgent-terrorist housekeeping in the dusty towns way out there, and the US forces admitting that they have no way to monitor the flow, and no way to stop it.

And the press just keep getting killed. And those Iraqis brave (and stupid) enough to volunteer for service positions in their viciously re-arranged country just keep getting killed, singly and in surprisingly large groups.

And the terrorists just keep slaughtering the innocents, in swaths that number in the hundreds.

And the brainwashed, suicide-minded martyrs just keep showing up, drawn by the magnet of easy targets, great training, the best jihad environment since Soviet Afghanistan 20-odd years ago. Dubya and his cabal talk about Iraq and terrorism, and yeah, the two now are inextricably linked, with this being Jihad Central, the Disney World of violent Islamic extremism. The Republicans have succeeded in taking a terrorism backwater--don't for a second believe the bullshit they're trying so desparately to feed the USofA about al Qaida planning 9/11 in Iraq and that crap--and in turning it into the greatest martyr magnet there has ever been. The US has given a struggling, flagging, isolated, repugnantly extremist and largely mainstream--rejected terrorism movement, and have turned it into a viable, enduring concern. The US adventure in Iraq has succeeded in cementing violent Islamic extremism as a threat to modern life and culture, and has given it a home. Thanks, George W. Bush, brave and fearless leader. Time for another vacation now, eh, you callous, cynical, uncaring brat. We were all better off when you were just a dead-end, self-destructive, spoiled rich boy.

And US troops just keep getting killed. We'll top 2000 by the end of the year. That's no Vietnam, for sure, but 2000 US soldiers dead? Isn't anyone upset by this? What about the 20,000-odd who've lost eyes and feet and hands, like my buddy from a few years back? What about him, all medically retired now and shipped right on out of the Army?

What exactly is the point of this Iraq war again? Regime change? No, that wasn't the stated reason, only what was provided after the fact. WMD? Yeah, that was the reason going in, to protect the USofA from Iraqi ICBMs which were going to rain down on the country from Iraq. Yeah, right. That was a crock, and was proven so soon enough. Anyone who believes for an instant that the administration was 'fooled' or 'misled' or 'duped' by inaccurate intelligence and analysis is an absolute fool. I'm more than tangentially involved in this line of work, and I can assure you that the administration knew exactly what it was doing at every single step. Just like an intellectually maturing child, they rationalized that it would be easier to ask for forgiveness after the fact than it would be to ask for permission beforehand.

And here we are after the fact, and of course there is no request for forgiveness, no apology, no admission of missteps or bad assumptions. This is complete denial, a simple close-minded approach to conducting business that shuts off all discussion, all commentary, and accepts nothing but the praise and accolades which are both less and less in frequency and increasingly hollow and meaningless. Day by day, more and more people see that the emperor has no clothes.