The Washington Post is running an article today asserting that Democrats are being "forced" to move the invasion and occupation of Iraq to front and center in response to BushCo's exponentially increasing lunacy on the matter:
(Also available at My Left Wing)
Democrats had hoped that the headlines and evening news would be dominated by votes in Congress to bolster homeland security, raise the minimum wage, fund stem cell research and grant the federal government authority to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare. . .
But with Bush's long-awaited policy address tentatively set for midweek, those much-touted bills are not likely to lead the news, and the Democratic leaders have been forced to change their tactics.
"The challenge for them is this: Iraq is the central issue. It's an enormous problem for the president and the Republicans, but it has the suffocating effect of taking attention away from the Democrats' domestic legislative priorities, and I think they understand that," said Joe Lockhart, a White House press secretary in the Clinton administration.
" 'Oh no! Oh no! We have to deal with Iraq! We have to deal with Iraq!' the frantic Democrats cry" is the Conventional Wisdumb the article spouts. "Oh dear, oh dear! The Democrats will have to put their beloved domestic agenda on the back burner in order to address the White House's imminent Iraq 'policy' statement"
Gimme a friggin' break. Here's what's true:
The Madness of King George is a Gift From Heaven for the Democrats.
- The more the White House stokes its own obtuse rhetoric about its plans for Iraq/n and the Middle East, the less work the other 80% of the country has to do to prove that those backing the escalation of the war are certifiably insane.
- The more 1960s-era PNAC acid the administration drops, the easier it is for Joe Sixpack to understand that impeachment is not just advisable, but an absolute necessity for the preservation of this country.
- The harder BushCheney Inc. eructs about a "surge" (and c'mon, you gotta admit, "surge" sounds like a personal condition afflicting overweight middle-aged men for which science is seeking a miracle cure, to be advertised on late-night television) the stronger Pelosi and Company can be in saying,
"Are you out of your f!@#ing minds?" "NO." As in, "Hell, no."
These guys just don't ever learn - thank God. Just like during the campaign leading up to November's midterm elections, every time a Republican opens his mouth to support the White House position on Iraq/n, a Democrat grows another vertebra.
And since following the advice of the neocons at the Project for the New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute has so far proven wildly successful in Iraq/n, the White House is once again making Bill Kristol's day by gearing up for Operation Colossal Screwup II, to lead us to the Great Victory that is inevitably ours in that wonderful utopian oil deposit uh, bastion of freedom and democracy that is Iraq/n.
It's like BushCheney Inc. has been piloting the ship of state relying on Kristol and the PNAC nimrods to navigate for them. "Okay! That route through Iraq looks clear to me! We'll be greeted as cruise ship tourists! It may take six days, six weeks - I doubt six months!"
Of course, only after Captain Bush had plowed into a few icebergs did someone have the heart to mention a little bit of the nuance of navigating the tricky waters of the Arabic Sea of nations. "Oops, heh-heh. Ya mean, there's ackshully, uh, two kands a Muslim water, frozen an' unfrozen? Oops, heh-heh."
And now that the impossibly wrong prognosticators of the PNAC and AEI have guided us into these disastrous waters, they want to accelerate. "What's that? You want us to surge Together Forward?" our Dear Leader says, nodding idiotically and twitching like a tweaker. "Heh-heh. Okeee, then. Where's that throttle? Woo-hooo!"
These guys don't understand that their "foreign policy" theories went out with tailfins and bobby sox. Like this gem from an L.A. Times article the other day as cited in chasm’s diary (emphases added):
These neoconservative thinkers have long advocated for a more classic counterinsurgency campaign: a manpower-heavy operation that would take U.S. soldiers out of their large bases dotted across the country and push them into small outposts in troubled towns and neighborhoods to interact with ordinary Iraqis and earn their trust.
Huh. Yuh, right. "More classic"? Yeah, more classic - like TVs with tubes (and, for those of you too young to remember, I don't mean Sen. Ted Stevens's internets tubes).
Yeah, whatever you say, Bill. Huh-LOH-oh! Does the phrase, "strategic hamlets" ring a bell? Let's see, let's see - oh yeah! Lemme pull out Stanley Karnow's authoritative 1983 work, Vietnam: A History, and see what it has to say about that:
[T]he "strategic hamlet" program, a vast and expensive enterprise [was] launched in early 1962.
The plan was to corral peasants into armed stockades, thereby depriving the Vietcong of their support, which could not survive without the population just as fish die outside water, as Mao Zedong's image put it.
[snip]
A pilot project dubbed Operation Sunrise was launched in March 1962 in Binh Duong province, a landscape of jungles and rubber plantations north of Saigon. Vietcong units, strong in the area, melted away as government troops poured in to set up five strategic hamlets in Ben Cat district. The Vietcong stood back, watching the regime fumble. The first stockade, for example, was situated so far from the nearest market that only seventy out of two hundred peasant families moved voluntarily, carrying their meager belongings on bicycles or on their backs. They were soon disappointed when the government withheld the funds prom- ised them until it was sure they would not bolt. The peasants were supposed to defend the hamlet themselves, but most of the able-bodied men had rallied to the Vietcong, perhaps less out of conviction than in defiance of the regime's coercive methods.
Two Vietnamese-speaking RAND researchers, John Donnell and Gerald Hickey, concluded after observing the Ben Cat test that it was being bungled. But with U.S. approval and financing, the government continued to commit the same errors elsewhere. Given catchy titles in different sectors, like Operation Sea Swallow or Operation Royal Phoenix, the program surged ahead; the regime announced with dubious precision at the end of September 1962 that 4,322,034 people, or 33.39 percent of the population, were in strategic hamlets—with more scheduled to move. Donnell later called the figure "statistical razzle-dazzle" of the kind that pleased McNamara. It also nourished [Ngo Dinh]Nhu's fantasy that [Nhu, brother of South Vietnamese President Diem,] had sparked a rural revolution that would undermine the Vietcong.
In reality, the program often converted peasants into Vietcong sympathizers. Peasants in many places resented working without pay to dig moats, implant bamboo stakes, and erect fences against an enemy that did not threaten them but directed its sights against government officials. Numbers of strategic hamlets, therefore, were Potemkin villages mainly designed to impress visiting dignitaries. Even peasants who agreed to join local self-defense groups were disenchanted when the government failed to furnish them with weapons, and many were antagonized by corrupt officials who embezzled money earmarked for seed, fertilizer, and irrigation as well as medical care, education, and other social benefits.
[snip]
Interestingly, Nhu's chief lieutenant in carrying out the strategic hamlet program was Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, the secret Communist operative. Years afterward, Communist sources would disclose to me that Thao had deliberately propelled the program ahead at breakneck speed in order to estrange South Vietnam's peasants and drive them into the arms of the Vietcong. Nhu had been duped.
At the working level, American soldiers and civilians in Vietnam decried the strategic hamlet scheme. One U.S. officer in the Mekong delta criticized Diem's lopsided priorities, saying that he was "trying to hold everything and thus holding very little."
- pgs. 254-256
Back in September, I wrote a diary entitled, "Iraq is NOT Vietnam," which pointed out that, well, yeah, in so many ways, Iraq IS Vietnam, all over again, 40 years later, with better stereos. I used Karnow’s book as the primary source for description and analysis of the huge blunder that was the Vietnam War. The analogies between Iraq and Vietnam were and are striking.
I didn’t think I’d have to go to that well again.
Silly me.
Since BushCheney Inc. apparently are satisfied customers of the kind of foreign policy drivel the yahoos at PNAC and AEI are doling out, we in the reality-based community get to keep referring to people who have been around the block a time or two with these Bozos®. Here’s what Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, had to say about neocons back in 2000 (emphasis added):
Recently, in an attempt to justify the U.S. commitment, a featherweight group of neoconservative think-tankers (few of whom have any firsthand experience of either the country or the war) has begun rattling 30-year-old sabers, alleging that America broke its "word of honor" to its ally, asserting that the war could have been won and reviving the dubious domino-theory thesis that the war was necessary to halt the Soviet Union's global aspirations. This revisionist wave has been successful in landing its exponents on talk shows. It has been far less successful at convincing most experts. This is not surprising, for it has little basis in fact.
And here’s what he had to say in September 2003, in a piece written for the L.A. Times (via CommonDreams.org):
Perhaps the most striking similarity is this: Those of us who covered Vietnam were regularly inundated by civilian and military bureaucrats with piles of glowing details, charts and statistics devised to show progress. We spoofed their daily briefings in Saigon as the "Five O'Clock Follies" and learned from accompanying U.S. soldiers into battle that they were either distorting the truth or blatantly lying.
Today, as I listen to Bush and his spokesmen deliver euphoric accounts of the headway being made in Iraq, they remind me of the bulletins from Vietnam that reassured us that "victory is just around the corner" and that "we see the light at the end of the tunnel." As the war escalated in Vietnam, members of Congress privately began to oppose what increasingly seemed to be a futile enterprise. But they never failed to vote funds for the venture on the grounds that "we can't let down our boys."
What seems to be the "blueprint" for the new plan to be announced tomorrow by Gilligan erm, The Skipper, might well be this document (PDF file) freshly minted by the brain trust at the AEI – otherwise known as Fred Kagan:
"Choosing Victory." Riiiiight. It’s all about my choice, right? Okay, everybody – GROUP HUG!
The report was ably deconstructed by chasm in his diary on Friday. chasm, however, failed to give the report its due in the "humor" department - more specifically, in the "Don't Try To Read This Thing At Work Or While Eating 'Cause You'll Spew All Over Whatever's In Front Of You, It's That Freakin' Hysterical" department.
First of all, you know it was prepared for someone whose preferred reading material has strong, thick pages and lots of pictures of cloven-hooved farm animals, 'cause THE TYPE IS VERY LARGE, AND MOST OF THE WORDS ARE VERY SMALL. And the pretty pictures? Oy.
I mean, just look at this brightly colored map of Baghdad:
- now, even for someone who didn't use to know the difference between Shi'a and Sunni, that is one cool map, right? (Although I couldn't find the wording around the edges of the map saying, "Here be insurgents.")
And here - here's just a sample of some of the well-thought-out, nuanced text:
Proposal: Victory through Security
- Endstate is free and secure Iraq
- Acceptable increase in troops in Iraq:
- Creates security in Baghdad by Fall '07
- Creates options for future operations in Iraq
<courtesy pause, just in case they're serious, then:>
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
That meaty portion in the gray box just above, by the way, just so you know, takes up one entire 8-1/2 x 11 page.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what passes for strategic military and foreign policy planning in our current administration.
Hey, ya gotta give those guys at the PNAC American Enterprise Institute credit: Like the great military strategists that they are, they know their target audience.
So, while Georgie Porgie gets to wear his sailor cap and codpiece, and land on the decks of aircraft carriers while belting out a chorus of "In the Navy," the ship of state is barreling toward a rendezvous with disaster.
But have no fear – Congressional Democrats can walk and chew gum – and probably talk on their cell phone at the same time, too.
Congressional investigations - remember those? No, probably not, unless you're at least, oh, 26 or 27 or so - are beginning. The lawlessness, avarice, petty criminality, barbarity, arrogance and contempt of the Republicans in charge the past six years will be revealed in all of their horror. What will follow those revelations is almost inevitable - although I have no doubt the current thugs leading the Republican mafia will put their own hoodlumish spin on it.
And as soon as that jagged gash has been torn in the once-seemingly impenetrable hull of the ship of Republican state - the S.S.Titanic Clusterfuck - and the ship has taken on enough water, all the little rats who have been trying to stay out of sight during the past six years as they gnawed gaping holes in Americans' safety, security, financial well-being and international respect, will rush pell-mell to the lifeboats.
And when that surge of craven cowardly rats gets to the gunwales and looks up, whiskers twitching, the only lifeboats they're gonna see - the only way they're not going down with that doomed fast-sinking ship that is The Republican Party As We Know It - are all gonna have one word emblazoned across their transoms:
IMPEACHMENT
Think those Republican rats are gonna hesitate for even one second to get on board those boats to save their little rodent hides?
Heh. There won't be enough lifeboats for 'em.