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08/28/2005: You can Dress Iraq Up...
....But just won't be able to take her anywhere...(without a burka and a male escort - that is.)
Colbert I. King (Washington Post) wrote this piece, Rallying the Troops and Avoiding Reality:"...Get ready instead for some form of Islamic republic in Iraq that gives special status to clerics and majority ethnic groups, and less deference to women's rights. A new Iraq free of violence and divisions? Oops, never mind.
Which brings us back to the troops who are doing the suffering and dying. Are their sacrifices worth it?
Consider the Iraq now unfolding on the ground
What's the value of Americans giving their lives so that cleric-dominated Shiites and northern Kurds can get their hands on political power and oil revenue?
Why are American women and men sacrificing lives and limbs in a country where women may have to settle for less?
Stay the course. What course? So religious-based militia can divvy up the northern and southern portions of the country? So Islam can be enshrined as a principal source of new Iraqi legislation?
Are any of those things worth dying for? Do any of those likely outcomes represent an American victory? They certainly aren't why Bush said we went over there.
Okay, the Bush folks also promised us weapons of mass destruction, and greetings with rice and rose water, and Iraqi oil money to pay for reconstruction, and a model new democracy in the Middle East, none of which has happened.
But this is different.
President Bush is out selling a vision of victory in Iraq while U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad are resigned to settling for less. George Bush can't make good on his original promise, and they know it. They also know that more Americans are going to die in Iraq for what may end up as a theocracy-tinged spoils system.
When those carrying the burden of this war realize what they have sacrificed and died for, the worst days of George W. Bush will have just begun.
But, apparently, for people like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan those “realizations” are NEVER gonna come, no matter what the realities:
Hitchens pens in A War To Be Proud Of things like:“… Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. ….Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.
…: It is out of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists.”
Cough- Ghaaak - Sputter...How about just turning the country over, via the Iraqi Constitutional processes, to an Islamic Republic of Shi’ites with close ties to Iran?? Hmmm…I didn’t notice this on his list of options???
And here’s as good a delusional puerile fantasy as any from 'ole Andrew Sullivan who writes: "Iraq is a rare case where we have real leverage for a short period of time."
Hahahahahahahaha!!!
Sheesh, I’d really like some of the mind altering DRUGS he’s are apparently enjoying with such relish. I feel most direly in need of some of this faux optimism.
But in case anyone hasn’t been paying close enough ATTENTION...we (as in the U.S.) have no leverage what so ever in Iraq over this Constitutional process and are in fact working hand-and-glove with the repressive mullahs to chisel this Islamic Republic based on the Shi'ite interpretation of religion down in Granite.
The realities of this process will tell the tale once it is finished but the notion that what is happening in Iraq is going to be “winning” anything beneficial to long tern US interests in the Middle East…well, there aren’t enough mind altering drugs in the world to make this pig with lipstick look good in bed.
Karen on 08.28.05 @ 07:09 AM CST
