What the American masses don't seem to get is that even as despised as Saddam was by many Iraqis, those very same Iraqis felt betrayed by Bush I and the Sunni Iraqis who supported Saddam felt that Bush I betrayed and suckered punched him at the beginning of Gulf War I.
The facts are that all of that is true, but Americans' seeming failure to see beyond waving flags and Bush self-righteousness and propaganda to understand the big picture prevents us from understanding the basics of one of the major issues preventing any real success (however that is being defined today).
No one named Bush could have ever succeeded in accomplishing the goals as they were told to the American people, once it became obvious to anyone with more than three neurons firing that "mushroom clouds and small pox sprayed all over the eastern seaboard" were nothing but terrorist tactics used by our own government in order to gain our support for an illegal and unjust war. (Who needs Osama when we have Dick Cheney?)
No government approved of by Bush will ever be accepted by the Iraqis and, possibly, approved by any American administration after the nightmare this administration has created in Iraq.
Why doesn't someone, in Washington, have the guts to just simply say it: Far more than America or Americans, in general, the very name "Bush" is despised by the Arab/Muslim masses and they have their reasons.
November 18, 2007
The Post's editorial dysfunction
The editorialists at the Washington Post should try reading the Washington Post. I know this is asking a lot -- such a concession would risk tailspinning their merely disturbed cognitive dissonance into a wildly despondent mental unblockage -- but some radical measure of intervention is worth the gamble. They simply cannot go on like this, lest they soon find themselves writing for Fox News, a fate worse than journalistic obscurity.
This morning the WP's plucky opinion crew has written yet another logic-defying, reportage-denying editorial on Iraq. It opens orgiastically, and only the full measure of their come-hither ecstasy will do as a quote:
THE EVIDENCE is now overwhelming that the "surge" of U.S. military forces in Iraq this year has been, in purely military terms, a remarkable success. By every metric used to measure the war -- total attacks, U.S. casualties, Iraqi casualties, suicide bombings, roadside bombs -- there has been an enormous improvement since January. U.S. commanders report that al-Qaeda has been cleared from large areas it once controlled and that its remaining forces in Iraq are reeling. Markets in Baghdad are reopening, and the curfew is being eased; the huge refugee flow out of the country has begun to reverse itself. Credit for these achievements belongs in large part to U.S. soldiers in Iraq, who took on a tremendously challenging new counterterrorism strategy and made it work; to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the architect of that strategy; and to President Bush, for making the decision to launch the surge against the advice of most of Congress and the country's foreign policy elite.
PRETTY THRILLING, huh? One can almost see the rockets' red glare, and the visage of George the Lionhearted is decidedly ineradicable.
But wait. A bummer is coming; their editorial erection is heading south. They're unable to cleanly wipe the day's problems from their minds and just lie back and enjoy the moment. It's frustrating, I know, but they smell trouble brewing in George and David's Middle East paradise -- dang it.
Or, as the editorial board put it with more than a trifle understatement: "It is, however, too early to celebrate," since, after all, "the principal objective of the surge was not military, but political." And, alas, that objective has met with unqualified failure.
Oh, shoot. And here we thought we were onto something -- a thought suggested by the very folks who then promptly suggested we forget all that. All their wooing and cooing meant nothing, since the cause of the troubles has been wholly unaltered by the surge's effect.
So what was their opening point? Just foreplay, I guess, which, of course, all real men -- even manly editorialists -- should properly disdain.
And their recommendation for recovery was just as disdainful, since it showed an utter lack of understanding of, say, Thomas Ricks' reporting in their own paper, which they acknowledge with only fleeting cognition.
"The White House and State Department seem to be turning their attention from Iraq at the very moment when they should be mounting a diplomatic offensive to secure concrete steps toward a political settlement," such as holding local elections, say the vastly worried editorialist. . "Such negligence would be another fateful mistake in the conduct of this war."
If they had read above, below and between Ricks' lines -- or perhaps even the lines themselves -- they would have realized his reporting allowed for only the bleakest of prognoses.
Quoting Ricks: "The best promise for breaking the deadlock would be holding provincial elections, [U.S. military] officers said -- though they recognize that elections could turn bloody and turbulent, undercutting the fragile stability they now see developing in Iraq....
"So, how to force political change ... without destabilizing the country further? 'I pity the guy who has to reconcile that tension,' said Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, the chief of planning for U.S. military operations in Baghdad."
Hopeless is hopeless, especially when the only possible cure exacerbates the disease.
As for the WP's editorial board's sorrowful dysfunction? They should consult a professional. Like Ricks.
****
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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