Because we went into Iraq instead of taking care of them.
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label War. Show all posts
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The Report You're Not Seeing in Our Media [Sic]
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in its annual review of world affairs that governments needed to do more to tackle a resurgent Al-Qaeda as well as limit the damage from global warming.
Its 400-page report assessed that global events from May 2006 to June 2007 were "discouraging," expressing disappointment that bloody violence in Iraq and Afghanistan had not been curbed and the Middle East crisis had deteriorated.
In part, it attributed events like North Korea's alleged nuclear missile tests and Iran's continued intransigence over its disputed atomic power programme on a White House weakened by its post-war policy in Iraq.
But on Islamist extremism, it said the United States and its allies had fundamentally failed to deal with Al-Qaeda, whose ideology inspired by Osama bin Laden had now taken such root that it would take decades to defeat.
Evidence of their failure to tackle the root causes rather than the symptoms of such extremism was seen in a worrying increase in radicalisation among European-based Muslims in the last 12 months, the IISS said.
…………….
Meanwhile, the think-tank said there was now a growing -- but still not universal -- recognition that global warming exists, may be man-made and that urgent action was needed to tackle the rise in harmful emissions.
Unchecked, the effects of global warming would be "catastrophic -- on the level of nuclear war -- if not in this century, certainly in the next," it said.
Temperature rises had important consequences for global security, having the potential to increase migration, water and food shortages and potentially exacerbate existing flashpoints and tensions, said the IISS.
In a stark warning, it said action taken by individual countries and the international community in the next few years would determine whether the second half of the 21st century would see instability, human tragedy and war or an easing of and adjustment to climate change, with an emphasis on multi-lateralism.
But wasn’t Britney slutty and fat?
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
They've looked at a map.
Mannion walks through exactly why these next 500 days will probably even more disastrous than the last 500 days.
Oh, and I happened to be flipping through to MSNBC last night just as Olbermann's Special Comment began. Intense, to say the least. The only thing more frustrating than what Olbermann is talking about, though, is the fact that everybody can say whatever they want...it's going to happen anyway, and the same people who folded five years ago are going to fold again. Wouldn't want to appear weak or unpatriotic, blah blah blah...
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Nothing for Him Left to Claim
. . . And the war was coming.
The earth was shaking.
And there was no more room
In the garden of Allah.
"Today I made an appearance downtown.
I am an expert witness, because I say I am.
And I said, 'Gentlemen . . . and I use that word loosely . . .
I will testify for you.
I'm a gun for hire, I'm a saint, I'm a liar
Because there are no facts, there is no truth,
Just data to be manipulated.
I can get you any result you like.
What's it worth to ya?
Because there is no wrong, there is no right.
And I sleep very well at night.
No shame, no solution,
No remorse, no retribution.
Just people selling t-shirts.
Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus.
And winning, winning, winning."
It was a pretty big year for predators.
The marketplace was on a roll.
And the land of opportunity
Spawned a whole new breed of men without souls.
This year, notoriety got all confused with fame,
And the devil is downhearted
Because there's nothing left for him to claim. . . .
"The Garden of Allah"
Don Henley, Stan Lynch, John Corey, and Paul Gurian
(c) 1995
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
You see...our problem...
...is that we just don't have enough single-minded determination. Yes. That's our problem in Iraq. We need to get our hands dirty. Take the gloves off. Get tougher. Beat down the bad guys. That will solve everything. And then freedom can truly be on the march. And if that doesn't work, hang the liberals.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
A Minister to Listen to
I can't say enough good about this essay in today's Boston Globe by an evangelical minister distraught about what's happened once again to his religion when the opportunists and powermongers have gotten hold of it. The best part is his reliance on the life and words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to explain what the evangelical should be doing in the world and how far removed that it is from the nationalistic perversion of religion that has occurred, just as it occurred under the Nazis in Bonhoeffer's time. Let's hope that this man gets more megaphone and the Franklin Grahams, whom he roundly and rightly smacks, actually do get what's coming to them on Judgment Day.
Here are a few excerpts to give you reason to read the whole thing:
These past six years have been transformative in the religious history of the United States. It is arguably the passing of the evangelical moment -- if not the end of evangelicalism's cultural and political relevance, then certainly the loss of its theological credibility. Conservative evangelical elites, in exchange for political access and power, have ransacked the faith and trivialized its convictions. It is as though these Christians consider themselves to be recipients of a special revelation, as if God has whispered eternal secrets in their ears and summoned them to world-historic leadership in the present and future.
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In a German concentration camp in 1944, the theologian, pastor, and Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered the future of the church in Germany as it lay in the ruins of its fatal allegiance to Hitler.
"The time of words is over," he wrote. "Our being a Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action."
Bonhoeffer, who had actively opposed the Nazis since the passage of the Aryan Laws of 1933 and was executed in April 1945, believed that the church had so compromised its witness to Jesus Christ that it was now incapable of "taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world." The misuse of the language of faith had humiliated the Word; any hope for renewal would need to begin with the humble recognition that God was most certainly tired of all our talk.
It is time to give Bonhoeffer's meditations a new hearing. With many other Christians in the United States and many more abroad, I have watched with horror in recent years as the name of Jesus has been used to serve national ambitions and justify war. Forgetting the difference between discipleship and partisanship, and with complete indifference to the wisdom and insights of the Christian tradition, we have recast the faith according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will-to-power, in the shallow waters of civic piety.
By the time American troops began bombing Baghdad before sunrise on March 20, 2003, the collective effort of the evangelical elites had sanctified the president's decision and encouraged the laity to believe that the war was God's will for the nation. Evangelicals preached for the war, prayed for the war, sang for the war, and offered God's blessings on the war.
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. . . I remember the outrage I felt when I saw a photograph in Time magazine during the 2004 presidential election of Christian Coalition activists in Ohio. Two men, both white, and both identified as Coalition members, are holding two crosses aloft. The crosses upon closer inspection appear to be made of balloons twisted together. Across the beam-section of one of the crosses was the "Bush-Cheney" logo, and alongside the president's name was the image of an American flag. In the second cross, the president's name appeared in full at the places where Jesus's hands were nailed.
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The gospel has been humiliated because too many American Christians have decided that there are more important things to talk about. We would rather talk about our country, our values, our troops, and our way of life; and although we might think we are paying tribute to God when we speak of these other things, we are only flattering ourselves.
If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos.
To a nation filled with intense religious fervor, the Hebrew prophet Amos said: You are not the holy people you imagine yourselves to be. Though the land is filled with festivals and assemblies, with songs and melodies, and with so much pious talk, these are not sounds and sights that are pleasing to the Lord. "Take away from me the noise of your congregations," Amos says, "you who have turned justice into poison."
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Franklin Graham, the evangelist (and son of Billy Graham), boasted that the American invasion of Iraq opens up exciting new opportunities for missions to non-Christian Arabs. This is not what the Hebrew or Christian prophets meant by righteousness and discipleship. In fact, the grotesque notion that preemptive war and the destruction of innocent life pave the way for the preaching of the Christian message strikes me as a mockery and a betrayal.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
History Echoes
One of the great travesties in human history has been the desecration of Jewish graves and cemeteries over the centuries by those who hate them. Another of the great travesties has been watching some Jews, when in power, repeat all the travesties bludgeoned on them over the centuries. Like this desecration of Muslim graves on the West Bank. Although some Jewish leaders have condemned the action, looks like the circle for too many Jews has been completed, to continue unbroken. Sad, sad, sad.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
The Tree Is Rotten
You've probably already read that Cindy Sheehan has quit her protest of our Iraq policies but not before issuing the truest critique of not just the Busheviks or the Dems but of this entire country that anyone has put out in a while. The problem isn't Georgi or feckless, gutless Dems. It's us. Her words apply to all of us:
"I have tried ever since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most."
If the US were a tree, with all its dead parts (Repubs) and disease (Dems, media, us), every tree surgeon would advise cutting it down. We tool along thinking that, even with Iraq, global warming and its water and energy brothers, the declining economy, sharpening divides by race and class, and anything else you want to add, we only need to trim the status quo here and prop it up there. Meanwhile, the rot proceeds. Through a grief that made her look at this nation through the lens of reality, Cindy Sheehan discovered a painful truth, much as, say, Mark Twain did in another time. Yes, something called the United States may exist after the flood of the next few decades recedes.
But it won't be the "United States."
Thursday, May 24, 2007
There’s unreal…
...and there’s UNFREAKINGREAL (via Avedon).
"Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program. That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces."I’m too flustered to actually form a real sentence about this, so I’ll just repeat what Avedon says. These people are just too stupid for words. I mean...GOD...
Friday, April 27, 2007
Truth to Power
My granddad was in Patton's troops in WWII, and I got whatever knowledge of the military I have from him. One thing I remember him telling me was that, the more you spoke your mind, the less likely you were to climb the promotions ladder. Because of the need to get things done, there was a meritocracy up to about the Lt. Colonel level. Then the ass-kissers and blowhards separated from the herd, making just about anyone above that level someone who, if you shook their hand, you better check for your watch. My own experience with lt. colonels convinced me that they were about the straightest-shooting and realistic folks I've ever been around. Think about that as you read this piece on an accomplished lt. colonel in Iraq who has just lowered the boom with a journal article on "General Failure."
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Matt Taibbi interviews Sy Hersh: I Can’t Say I Approve…
...of these two guys being in the same room at the same time. I mean...what if the building crumbles to the ground or something? We can’t lose them both.
And predictably, Taibbi had something to say about Imus as well...I’ll touch on this a bit more in my next post.Is what's gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse than what went on in the Nixon administration?
Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he's doing the right thing. I think he's a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He's a believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he's very dangerous, because he's an unguided missile, he's a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can't change what he wants to do. He can't deviate from his policy, and that's frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy -- whatever that means -- as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that's what drives him. That doesn't mean he's not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer.
...
Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this war from starting?You mean learn from the past? America?
Yes.No. We made the same dumb mistake. One of the arguments for going into Vietnam was that we had to stop the communist Chinese. The Chinese were behind everything -- we saw them and North Vietnam as one and the same. In reality, of course, the Chinese and the Vietnamese hated each other -- they had fought each other for 1,000 years. Four years after the war ended, in 1979, they got into a nasty little war of their own. So we were totally wrong about the entire premise of the war. And it's the same dumbness in this war, with Saddam and the terrorists.
On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and how to hide stuff over those years.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Where do you see yourself in 30 years?
Well if you’re Briton’s Ministry of Defence, apparently in a world where the glass is way more than half empty. With advances in weapons technology, a changing world cultural, and a number of other economic and social factors, the future is not looking so bright anymore – unless you’re looking forward to:
"Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. "Flashmobs" - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups."
It’s an interesting, yet frightening read. With an outlook this grim, it almost seems like it’ll be worth the wait when the machines rise against their human overlords in 2021.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Echoes and Mirrors
"Most shocking has been the treatment war wounded men received at some VA hospitals. Some of the institutions have consistently provided excellent care... But there were critical shortages of nurses, attendants, therapists, and even equipment. Some facilities had grown dilapidated, and wounded men, who surely deserved the best of all possible care, shared their sickbeds with rodents." —Tracy Kidder, on the plight of soldiers returning from Vietnam, in the March 1978 Atlantic.
Monday, February 26, 2007
In the Name of God
From the March Psychological Science, study that "scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers." Go read the whole thing, but here's the finale:
The research sheds light on the possible origins of violent religious fundamentalism and falls in line with theories proposed by scholars of religious terrorism, who hypothesize that exposure to violent scriptures may induce extremists to engage in aggressive actions. "To the extent religious extremists engage in prolonged, selective reading of the scriptures, focusing on violent retribution toward unbelievers instead of the overall message of acceptance and understanding," writes Bushman "one might expect to see increased brutality."
Holy duh.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Snowday Blogroll! (Part II): Other News
On to Part II: Other News, Both Frightening and Frivolous.
* Does “media” mean “unquestioning; falling in line” in some other language? I don’t understand how anybody can fall for this crap yet again (Left Coaster), much less people who are paid to report facts...then again, it’s not complete and total slavish repetition of the party line this time (Liberal Oasis), so I guess that’s something. Not much of something, but something nonetheless. My god, saying “Baby I’ve changed...you can trust me this time” (Upyernoz) better not work. Actually, they're not even saying it's different this time--they're just pretending like they've been right about everything, and nobody has any choice but to trust them.
* Peace > War (CorrenteWire). Great post. Loved this quote: “War cannot be a necessary evil, because non-violence is a necessary good.” But meanwhile, President > Everybody Else in the World Combined (Digby). And yes, he’s our President, not our Commander-in-Chief. And I don’t understand how you can respond to “The War Powers Act requires Congress to vote on whether we should insert troops into hostile situations. The law is clear,” with “Absolutely not,” but whaddo I know. I’m not a congressman. Ggh.
* Saints McCain and Joementum have a really interesting way of supporting the troops (C&L). As does Dear Leader (Gadflyer). Just disgusting.
* This shouldn’t be a surprise (spiiderweb) coming from this administration, who would have given the Medal of Honor to Himmler if he were enough of a good ol’ boy.
* Erik from Alter Destiny got to sit in on an Exxon Mobil conference call with a couple other progressive bloggers. It’s an interesting read. The Far in Lefarkins (LG&M) was in on the call as well.
* Texas coal is now affecting Oklahoma air quality, and Oklahoma might actually do something about it (from a BooMan diary). Impressive.
* This is fantastic (Mercury Rising), and I really hope it’s the start of a trend. Note to progressives in power: It had BETTER be the start of a trend.
* 24 is a good show, according to my many liberal friends who watch it religiously, but when it’s seen as something close to reality TV (Attytood), then I start to have SERIOUS issues. But not as many issues as the people who consider it reality TV have, of course. IT’S A TV SHOW. Wolcott chips in here. Demosthenes adds this:
Surnow has been confronted again and again by real military personnel who have real interrogation experience trying to tell him that what he depicts on the show doesn't work in real life and is negatively influencing real interrogators in Iraq, but he can't be bothered to listen, busy as he is conferencing with the likes of Roger Ailes about future shows. So Jack keeps torturing.* Echidne discusses Harvard’s hiring of a female president.
* David at Debate Link has a fantastic summary of the recent slew of posts regarding prison rape. It’s most certainly been turned into a joke in pop culture, and I really don’t know how you turn that around at this point.
* In science news, it’s Darwin Day (here’s a nice list of science blogs from Skippy), and the Center for American Progress takes on ignorant Missouri legislators and their cutting off of their science nose to spite their stem cell face (via Fired Up! Missouri). But then again, at least no one from Missouri has said this...as far as I know, at least (Gristmill). Dinosaur farts? Really?
* And speaking of conservatives and science, at least they’re making their true feelings known, I guess (Greenwald, at his new home).
* Since when has being an outlaw been bad in country music (First Draft)??
* And finally, Mannion discusses The Queen and Diana. And Attaturk gets his hands on some Valentines. Lovely.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Oh sweet effing jesus...
...I mean, we knew stuff like this was true, but that doesn't mean we wanted it confirmed, you know (via Atrios and Carpetbagger)?
In going for more troops, Bush is picking an option that seems to have little favor beyond the White House and a handful of hawks on Capitol Hill and in think tanks who have been promoting the idea almost since the time of the invasion.There are a couple of quotes I want to point out, but first, here is the response from the Carpetbagger Report...
...
Although the president was publicly polite, few of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations appealed to the administration, which intensified its own deliberations over a new "way forward" in Iraq. How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme.
As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton.
The Bush gang decided to change course in Iraq, but went out of their way to “look distinctive” from the Iraq Study Group? Troop escalation wasn’t in the ISG report, so the Bush gang latched onto the idea because the ISG didn’t endorse it? As if this all some kind of exercise in Oedipal spite?Again...vanity, arrogance, takes-advice-worse-than-a-spoiled-child...we knew our president had all these characteristics. But still.
Exactly what kind of men-children are we dealing with here?
Legal Fiction’s publius, who also seemed disturbed by this, had a good piece on the subject.[I]f the NSC official is correct, Bush is picking this option out of vanity and spite simply because the Baker Group didn’t offer it.
All in all, it sounds like a promising strategy. After all, if history has taught us nothing else, it’s that military strategies with no empirical basis adopted out of pride and vanity are usually phenomenally successful.
This whole story, though, comes down to two main quotes. First...
The president wasn't satisfied with the recommendations he was getting, and he thought we need a strategy that was more purposeful and likely to succeed if the Iraqis could make that possible," said Philip D. Zelikow, who recently stepped down as State Department counselor after being involved with Iraqi policy the past two years."I mean...the plan woulda worked if not for them damn freedom-hating Iraqis..."
And second...
He has fashioned a plan to add up to 20,000 troops to the 132,000 U.S. service members already on the ground. As Bush plans it, the military will soon be "surging" in Iraq two months after an election that many Democrats interpreted as a mandate to begin withdrawing troops.Just in case he hadn't already, he is sealing his fate with this one. The American public has said they don't want to a) be in Iraq, or b) send more troops to Iraq. And beyond that, Bush is wanting to send (last I heard) 21,500 troops when he's been told that 9,000 are available. So we'll be sending about 12,000 or so unprepared troops over to fight. As publius goes on to say in the above-linked post, "Bush is choosing an option that has zero support from anyone except those who have consistently been wrong about pretty much everything relating to Iraq. Military officials, Middle East experts, and foreign officials are all opposed because they don't think it will work. And that makes sense given that the underlying problem today in 2007 is not so much a lack of security, but a sectarian civil war that is ultimately a political problem."
He thinks he's playing a war game on Xbox...there are no real consequences to his actions and he's too lazy to get up and hit the Reset button, so he's just going to play this out and make sure it doesn't work. Never mind that he's playing with real lives.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Sadaam and Bush's Law...
I really wanted to mention something about Sadaam’s execution, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to write a full post of it. All I had to say on it was, “Only Dubya and his people could turn the one thing we (basically) got right into another giant screw-up.” Well, that wasn’t really insightful enough to post, was it? Luckily for me, Digby and Matt Taibbi (and scores of others) were on their A-game for this one. Not that you haven’t already read these, but for those of you who don’t actually read other blogs, I’ll post them anyway.
First, in today’s “Low Post” column (and seriously, I’m really ticked that I never came up with “Hussein in the Membrane”), Taibbi successfully summarizes the whole debacle in one paragraph...
And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."And then he continues...
The whole war has been characterized by this kind of behavior. The Americans continually make ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, and they keep responding to their mistakes by digging down and seeking the aid of the same homespun American pseudo-folk wisdom that got them into this mess in the first place. Our foreign policy initiatives in the area resemble attempts to mend fences with a neighbor whose lawn has been mussed by bringing him a tuna casserole cooked specially by wifey; only in Iraq, when casserole-presenting Dad ends up with his eyes gouged out and his skull charred black, hanging upside down from a telephone wire and impaled on the shards of the casserole dish, the neighborhood committee convenes and...decides to bake a bigger casserole.And then he nails the newest debacle (I apologize for this giant blurb...I just didn’t know where to cut it off)...
The execution was a complete and utter fiasco. When what is supposed to be a P.R. coup for the United States devolves into a situation where a crowd of Shia fanatics is chanting "Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!" under the swinging feet of a new Sunni martyr, something has gone horribly wrong.The whole thing is that good. I promise I didn't post all the good stuff.
Not only did Saddam's execution serve notice to the entire world that the United States has essentially become the easily manipulated muscle for Shiite extremists in Iraq, but it infuriated the entire Sunni world by its timing -- the execution coincided with the Islamic holiday Eid.
Moreover, the U.S. even managed to alienate Shiites around the world by intervening in the execution process -- not enough to stop or slow the execution, mind you, but just enough to take Saddam's body away from the Shiites and force them to deliver it back to Saddam's home city for a "decent burial."
Now we've pissed off both the Shiites and the Sunnis and gotten both sides markedly more pissed off with each other (not just in Iraq but around the world), and we've done so by accelerating the execution of a prominent Sunni politician whose fate was the one card the United States was really holding with a Sunni minority already deeply upset at being made the subjects -- at the end of an American bayonet -- to a Shiite-led government.
Not only that, but the execution put the finishing touches on the "democracy lesson" we've supposedly been giving the Iraqi people, who, thanks to this move, still have yet to experience a government where a leader can leave power without losing his life. That is some interesting-tasting lemonade, I must say.
Rhetorical question: if you're going to offend the earth's entire Sunni population by letting a Shiite mob hang a prominent Sunni politician on a Muslim holiday -- on television on a Muslim holiday -- why bother interfering in the burial question? Seriously, why? To curry favor with the Sunnis? Because it's "the right thing" to do? What kind of deranged lunatic hangs "the Sunni sword" at the end of Ramadan and then tries to make up for it with the world's Sunnis by allowing a "civilized" burial? "We will all become a bomb," is how one Palestinian responded to this latest act of decency and goodwill on the part of the United States.
I'm not saying Saddam Hussein deserved to live. Fuck Saddam Hussein. The point is that his execution is a symbol of America's cultural blindness. America has one gear in its head: Saddam was a monster and a mass-murderer, so he should be executed and everyone should love us for doing it. Right? I mean, who doesn't like a tuna casserole?
Digby tackled the Sadaam issue pretty much immediately, with this post from Monday:
Saddam Hussein is the the man I would have thought was least likely to be turned into a martyr, but damned if they didn't manage to do it. Bush's Law. And here's the great thing about it --- the US, which claims rather unconvincingly that it had no say in this because Iraq is a sovereign country, gets blamed for this right along with the Shi'a government and Moqtada al Sadr. Terrific. Lose, lose for us --- as usual. Heckuva job, Bushie.Salon’s Joan Walsh chipped in, too. They all said basically the same thing, but they all said it well.
...
What a horrible, stupid cock-up on top of all the other horrible stupid cock-ups. The United States simply cannot do anything right in Iraq. Nada.
...
Leave it to an atheist to see the glaring religious symbolism:You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what's the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don't they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they've apparently done the execution at a time when it is "religiously unacceptable", and we've got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.
It was impossible not to notice that the Democrats came to power against the backdrop of two widely watched deaths -- Saddam Hussein's execution, which divided Sunni and Shiite in Iraq, and former President Gerald Ford's quiet passing, which briefly united this country. The symbolism was powerful. The controversy over Saddam's taunting, and what came to look like his lynching, at the hands of the Mahdi Army was a perfect microcosm of our can't-win situation in Baghdad. We couldn't execute him ourselves, so we handed him over to the Shiite-dominated al-Maliki government, which defied the U.S. and rushed to execute Saddam at dawn on Saturday, while Sunni Muslims were celebrating Eid-al-Adha. (For Shiites, the holiday didn't start until Saturday evening.) But that's self-governance; the Iraqis stood up, the Bush administration had to stand down, and together they managed to make a Sunni martyr out of a murdering tyrant.We're only one day or so (and as I said earlier, a few of the thousands of tests) into the new Congress, but on Democrats and the Iraq issue, so far so good, I guess.
By contrast, the lovely pageantry that followed the death of President Ford inspired an understandable yearning for a more bipartisan era. But if President Bush felt his heartstrings tugged, it didn't show. He came straight from the funeral and talked bipartisanship while promising no surrender -- he wants his temporary tax cuts to be permanent, he wants more troops in Iraq, he wants Democrats to balance the budget. Democrats should spurn the White House's insincere advances and develop an aggressive plan to end the war with as little carnage as possible.
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