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…recognizes Mr. bin Laden from Saudi Arabia for four minutes.

Thursday 15 February 2007

Listening to NPR coming home a couple of days ago, I heard the most curious thing. Regarding the House debate on Iraq, a Republican representative  then name escapes me, but it’s a virtual party-wide sentiment  said that in this debate “the terrorists are dividing us.”

Huh?

Did bin Laden get on the House floor and propose this debate? Have Hezbollah members been elected and hijacked the House agenda? No, what happened was exactly what those folks don’t want to happen: debate. It’s the ultimate indication of a truly free society.

“We’re sending a message to the terrorists that we’re weak!” war hawks cry. No — we’re sending a message that we’re strong, that unlike the Islamic world theocracy they would like to enact, our state can handle political disagreement.

“We’re sending the wrong message to our troops.” Well, I’m not a soldier on the front, and neither was the representative who made this statement. However, it needs to be stated that the nonbinding resolution deals with the President’s performance in regard to Iraq, not the soldiers’.

What’s most astounding about some Republican’s disgust at the notion of having a public debate about how things are going in Iraq is the simple fact that this is the first time it’s happened since the war began. This is not a continually occurring thing. “Oh no, here those Democrats go again! Didn’t we do this last session?” Instead, while in the majority, the Republicans tried to stifle all such debate.

Which is odd, because I thought that was one of the things that made our country a pretty good place to be.

Open a Can of Wup Ass

Saturday 20 January 2007

Reading through old journal entries the other night, I found a poem I’d received in a forwarded email in April of 2002:

American Pride

Osama Bin Laden, your time is short;
We’d rather you die, than come to court.
Why are you hiding if it was in God’s name?
Your just a punk with a turban; a pathetic shame.

I have a question, about your theory and laws;
“How come you never die for the cause?”
Is it because you’re a coward who counts on others?
Well here in America, we stand by our brothers.

As is usual, you failed in your mission;
If you expected pure chaos, you can keep on wishing
Americans are now focused and stronger than ever;
Your death has become our next endeavor.

What you tried to kill, doesn’t live in our walls;
It’s not in buildings or shopping malls.
If all of our structures came crashing down;
It would still be there, safe and sound.

Because pride and courage can’t be destroyed;
Even if the towers leave a deep void.
We’ll band together and fill the holes
We’ll bury our dead and bless their souls.

But then our energy will focus on you;
And you’ll feel the wrath of the Red, White and Blue.
So slither and hide like a snake in the grass;
Because America’s coming to kick your ass!!

Looking back on it, almost five years later, the poem and the sentiment it expresses are even more tragically pathetic. Many of the people who sent this around the country were most likely the ones who voted for Bush back in 2000 and were glad that he — “A real man, by God!” — was in office on 9/11. They probably had no doubt that America would go after bin Laden with a fury that the world had never seen.

Most of us had no doubt about that.

Bush’s speech on September 13, 2001, confirmed this: “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.”

They were probably surprised when, eighteen months later, Bush said that while bin Laden must be “on the run, if he’s alive at all,” he conceded that he doesn’t “spend too much time on him.” (Source)

Now, in 2007, with Bush promising a “surge” that virtually no one wants, with bin Laden still at large, with Iraq virtually at war with itself, with the Taliban re-grouping, it all just seems like the taunts of a thirteen-year-old.

It smacks of insecurity — and by that I mean a lack of both self-confidence and a lack of a feeling of safety.

Gates Hearings

Wednesday 6 December 2006

I think many of us are fairly impressed with Robert Gates’ confirmation hearings yesterday, but I think Slate summed it up best with their headline: Enter the Grown-Up.

Condi’s Coffee Pot

Sunday 3 December 2006

When K and I moved to America, one of the things we would have lacked, were it not for the ingenuity of American capitalism and a heads-up play by my mother, would have been a coffee maker. That would have been a disaster. Yet it was a disaster averted, because my mother had signed up for a Gevalia coffee trial offer and had a coffee maker waiting for us.

Since my mother doesn’t drink so much coffee these days and my father is not so picky, we said we’d make the necessary purchases to fulfill the trial agreement. The coffee we got from Gevalia was actually pretty decent.

As time passed and K and I started feeling less fiscally uncertain, we began really living the American dream: we began spending more money. And one thing we started spending more money on was music. In order to get a lot of new music quick, we did old join/drop-Columbia-House- in-one-month thing that my best friend and I did in high school so many time.

I’ve often wondered what that says about the actual cost of a CD when a company can essentially sell you a significant number of them for about $2.30 a piece. I guess the inflated prices of the regularly priced CDs is supposed to make up for that, else they wouldn’t be in business.

Eventually, we were “settled” enough that we decided to buy another car. We went out one Sunday and began looking at what was out there. At the Kia dealer, we were bamboozled into a test drive, even though we said we were only interested in talking about prices, features, warranties and such. Taking a test drive, though, indicated that we were a step closer to buying than we actually were.

Looking back on it, K and I were furious that we’d allowed ourselves to be manipulated as we had, for the whole awful adventure ended with us sitting with a salesman trying to be firm and yet polite in telling him, “No, we are not going to buy a new car today. We just came to look.”

I guess trial memberships and test drives are as American as any cliche about American-ness you can think of. In an age of a million choices, we consumers don’t want to make a fiscal commitment to something unless we can help it. And this has evolved into a country where we can get trial sizes and sample packs of even pharmaceuticals.

And that’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s suggestion that we should “Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis.” It’s not a commitment, and we can easily change our minds.

This letters shows that such a the Bush administration had a pathological reluctance to change its mind on Iraq policy because it would say to the world that we might have lost. Changing your strategy is the same as admitting, “If we had not changed strategy and tactics, we would have lost this war.”

America doesn’t change its mind! In its march for freedom, America is the only country seeking the pure good indeed, the philosophical “Good” for all humankind. Our goals are just, and so our methods must also be just and efficient.

Put simply, the Bush administration was so scared of the “L” word having to cross its collective lips that it was barreling ahead on its original plan, not looking left, not looking right, because “to move to another course” is the same as “losing”: “This [labeling our new strategy a “trial’] will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

We don’t lose if we don’t say the L word. We’re changing tactics not because we’re losing using these present tactics, but because we want that nice new coffee pot for Condi’s office.

We will leave Iraq on our terms as victors, as liberators! no matter how many linguistic contortions we have to go through to do so.

To Expand or Not To Expand

Friday 17 November 2006

McCain wants more troops in Iraq; the generals don’t:

Military officials and defense experts, however, said yesterday that significantly escalating the number of U.S. combat troops in Iraq is largely implausible because it would severely strain the military, would be unsustainable for more than a few months and would offer no discernable long-term benefit. (Post)

I’m no military expert — I’ve never even been in the military — but it seems to me that

  1. if things in Iraq are deteriorating;
  2. if our military is already so thinly spread that it would “severely strain the military” to add more troops;
  3. if the military says that adding more troops “would offer no discernable long-term benefit” to the operation…

If all these things are the case, then it’s hard to see how anyone in America could look at the situation, with that knowledge, and not see Iraq as the hopeless quagmire that it is.

“America’s new Vietnam!” was the cry from opponents in the States and enemies abroad, but this is so much more disastrous. Vietnam didn’t produce an army of individuals seeking revenge coupled with a culture in which individual “military” actions are the norm. Vietnam didn’t produce terrorists, in other words, and it’s difficult to foresee anything other than that coming out of Iraq.

If we stay, it’s an ever-present propaganda tool, not to mention a gigantic terrorist training camp. If we run, we “embolden” the enemy — not that they need any help with that. Still, it will prove to be a powerful recruiting device. “Look at our success with the Infidels! Imagine if we more aggressively take Jihad to their soil!”

In other words, “stay the course” and we make things worse; “cut and run” (or rather, “redeploy” or “withdraw” or any number of euphemisms) and we make things worse.

The problem is that we aren’t just fighting insurgents who want us out of Iraq. We’re also fighting insurgents whose primary goal seems to be civil war. If that’s true, we’re not trying to prevent civil war from breaking out as an unintended consequence; we’re trying to stop people from inciting civil war. It introductions a consciousness to the actions, not to mention, in this case, a perverted religious conscientiousness.

Elections

Sunday 30 January 2005

Relatively high voter turn-out; deaths held to double digits; dancing Iraqis.

Do they read this blog?

I stand humbly corrected.

All W’s Horses

Saturday 29 January 2005

So the Iraqi people are going to be voting in their first election. Many have pointed out the absurdity of the elections in which:

  • no one knows the candidates;
  • no one knows what the parties stand for;
  • insurgent violence will keep many away;
  • voter safety is an issue, and cannot be assured;
  • a significant portion of eligible voters has already declared, “We won’t vote”;
  • many Iraqis are arguing shouldn’t even take place.

Bush is ramming this election down their throats in an attempt to legitimate his decision to invade Iraq.

No one in Baghdad is calling the shots in Iraq’s surreal experiment with electoral politics.

The marching orders are coming from Washington. And after all the tragedies that Iraq has so far experienced, this continued direction from a distance promises even more tragedy and farce in the days to come (The Capital Times)

The elections don’t seem to differ that much from Saddam’s elections. Then, Iraqis went to the polling station to avoid retaliation from Saddam; now, Iraqis avoid the polling stations to avoid execution by the insurgents. Sunday’s election will be only slightly more legitimate than those during Saddam’s reign only in so far as the candidates don’t all represent the same agenda. In theory. But since no one really knows who the candidates are or what the parties represent (except there’s probably not any who express the _slightest_ amount of anti-US sentiment), for all the Iraqis know, they could all be voting for the same agenda, no matter whom they vote for.

Well, those that do get out and vote.

Was Bush really so blinded by his own idiocy? Did none of his advisers say, “Hey, maybe it’s not such a straightforward thing as going into the country and receiving the warm thanks of the newly-liberated Iraqis.” Did he really expect the Iraqis to start jumping up and down, clapping their hands like little girls, all saying in a unified voice, “We want elections!! We want elections!!”?

If Iraq were a chess game (and oh, that it were), Bush would play in the following method:

  1. Make an attack plan (He’d probably try the old worn out Scholar’s Mate), without giving thought to the opponent’s defense.
  2. Execute the attack plan.
  3. Ignore what the opponent is doing throughout the game and go ahead with the attack plan.
  4. When clear mistakes are made, continue with the attack plan.

The Bush administration seems to be incapable of such analytical thinking required by chess, much less required by war. Unfortunately, the pieces Bush is shuffling around live and breathe, as in Vonnegut’s short story “All the King’s Horses.”

Bush doesn’t seem to know he’s gotten the US in a no-win situation:

  • Postpone the election = cries of plans for on-going occupation
  • Let the elections continue = the mess we currently see

And the post-election reality doesn’t seem so bright either:

  • Withdraw troops = civil war in a matter of -weeks- days
  • Postpone the election = cries of plans for on-going occupation and increased “resistance”

Of course, it’s not as if people weren’t foreseeing this before the invasion. But Bush already had his mind up about

  • finding and destroying weapons of mass distruction;
  • bringing freedom and liberty to the oppressed Iraqi people;
  • shutting down Saddam’s terrorist support infastructure;
  • avenging the assination attempt on Daddy;
  • getting business for his buddies at Halliburton

and so no amount of reason could talk him out of it.

But you can’t reason with someone who has the mental ability of a turnip.

Tabulaphobia

Monday 6 December 2004

is, I’m assuming, a newly-coined (passive voice alert — subtly tooting my own cliche) fear: fear of blackboards. Rather, fear of cleaning blackboards. The joys of Iraq never cease.

Imagine having a serious discussion over who would eventually wipe clean the blackboard?