The Circle of Right

Post is a little long...sorry.

As stated on this blog before:

American Politics as reflected by current and future reality from places like Rush Limbaugh's drug intake system and the intersection of Banality Street & Insanity Avenue:

Step One: Dear Leader asserts we must take military action against a country because it is a danger.

Cliff May type:

"If we don't act, the next thing you know Saddam will be coming at us across Discount Gardener Land or Discount Pharmaceutical Land"

OR even better, trot out Dear Leader to say:

Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Step Two:

Proclaim that those who say that this proposal is not a good idea and based upon faulty intelligence or outright oppose it as being "traitors" or "unpatriotic".


Step Three:

Invade third world country with depleted military with world's most powerful military using air, sea, and ground forces. Express amazement that such a military could so thoroughly manage to defeat an amazingly impotent opponent. Reaffirm those criticized in step two and rub their noses in your hubris.

Let me say I'm disturbed by some of what Kamiya confesses, but extremely heartened by his honesty. It seems to me that a real anti-war liberal, with a heart and a head, is bound to feel deeply conflicted by all this. Contrast Kamiya with the apparatchik Krugman this morning and you see the difference between someone trying to figure this all out and someone who thinks he figured everything out years ago. (And notice Krugman's use of the term 'conquest' rather than liberation. Telling, don't you think?)

Oh, what was Krugman criticized for saying on April 11, 2003? Why this:

Credit where credit is due: the hawks were right to say that a whiff of precision-guided grapeshot would lead to the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. But even skeptics about this war expected a military victory. ("Of course we'll win on the battlefield, probably with ease" was the opening line of my start-of-the-war column.) Instead, we worried — and continue to worry — about what would follow. As another skeptic, Michael Kinsley of Slate, wrote yesterday: "I do hope to be proven wrong. But it hasn't happened yet."

Why worry? I won't pretend to have any insights into what is going on in the minds of the Iraqi people. But there is a pattern to the Bush administration's way of doing business that does not bode well for the future — a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect.

One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don't worry about breaking the rules. This technique brought them victory in the Florida recount battle, the passage of the 2001 tax cut, the fall of Kabul, victory in the midterm elections, and the fall of Baghdad.

But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they've won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot.

Anybody wonder if Sully has ever said, gee Krugman was right?

Why wonder. He hasn't.


Step Four:

Watch things go to shite, deny they are going to shite. For example, noted genius Donald Rumsfeld on June 17, 2003.

"In those regions where pockets of dead-enders are trying to reconstitute, Gen. (Tommy) Franks and his team are rooting them out," Rumsfeld said, referring to the U.S. commander in Iraq. "In short, the coalition is making good progress."

Step Five:

Things keep getting shitty, but surely event X will cause things to turn shite into roses.

Even the NYT had to give some credit to the Bush-Blair leadership that got us here. Add in the capture of Saddam - and the comparative calm in Iraq since - and we may have reached a mile-stone in the war on terror. It's a good moment to re-state that much criticism of the Bush-Blair policy has distorted it.

Step Six:

Well, okay there's a lot of shit and it's really bad, but still it's better!

"One thing is for certain: There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms."—Bush, press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 12, 2004

Ignore the fact that since that statement, there have been:

Mass Graves:
Handy-dandy Fallujah Memorial Soccer Field, circa April 2004.

Torture Rooms:

Rape Rooms:

"The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out... a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

-- Seymour Hersh


Step Seven: Find that the LAST reed upon which your policy hangs is going to shit. See today's headlines. Or this:

"The first democratic elections were held in Iraq on January 29, 2005 under the ever-watchful collective eye of the occupation forces, headed by the United States of America. Troops in tanks watched as swarms of warm, fuzzy Iraqis headed for the ballot boxes to select one of the American-approved candidates..."

It won't look good.

There are several problems. The first is the fact that, technically, we don't know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don't know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren't making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated.

Another problem is the selling of ballots. We're getting our ballots through the people who give out the food rations in the varying areas. The whole family is registered with this person(s) and the ages of the varying family members are known. Many, many, many people are not going to vote. Some of those people are selling their voting cards for up to $400. The word on the street is that these ballots are being bought by people coming in from Iran. They will purchase the ballots, make false IDs (which is ridiculously easy these days) and vote for SCIRI or Daawa candidates. Sunnis are receiving their ballots although they don't intend to vote, just so that they won't be sold.

Yet another issue is the fact that on all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled "male". Now, call me insane, but I found this slightly disturbing. Why was that done? Was it some sort of a mistake? Why is the sex on the card anyway? What difference does it make? There are some theories about this. Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families won't want their womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women's ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this 'mistake' will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.

All of this has given the coming elections a sort of sinister cloak. There is too much mystery involved and too little transparency. It is more than a little bit worrisome.

American politicians seem to be very confident that Iraq is going to come out of these elections with a secular government. How is that going to happen when many Shia Iraqis are being driven to vote with various fatwas from Sistani and gang? Sistani and some others of Iranian inclination came out with fatwas claiming that non-voters will burn in the hottest fires of the underworld for an eternity if they don't vote (I'm wondering- was this a fatwa borrowed from right-wing Bushies during the American elections?). So someone fuelled with a scorching fatwa like that one- how will they vote? Secular? Yeah, right.

And NOW, the Future:

Step Eight:

Declare the reason that things did not go as planned was all the liberals fault for not being on board immediately and not clapping louder.

In other words, the Right's foreign policy can be summed up as the "tinkerbell defense", because YOU did not believe, it is all your fault.

They are getting ready early on.