perfidy

A little fodder:

• Private Health Care Through Your Employer.  There's nuthin' beddah.  God intended it to be this way.  Why, the personal care of unsurpassed excellence we all get is all that stands between us and hell.
• Guns are Great.  If I can't shoot it, I can't control it.
• American Democracy Is The Only Real Democracy.  You can just shut the hell up if you think anything else!
• The Founding Fathers BLAH BLah Blah blah blah.  They knew everything.  They even know about the magazines in the back of your closet, they invented light bulbs and boxed lunches, and they don't approve of what we're doing.  No sir they don't.  Follow the recipe.
• Rich People Are Because They Are Just Plain Better People.  Luck, hereditary factors, hundreds of years of bia and bullshit, have nothing to do with it.  Please ignore the current round of cheatin' and lyin' on Wall Street.  Nothing to see here.  These are not the crooks you are looking for.  Move along.
• Market Uber Alles!  All human function can be controlled by markets.  All human functions must be controlled by markets.  If all human bodily functions were controlled by markets, our toilets would be 3.7% more efficient.  This would lead to world peace. 

Ah.  I feel so much better!  Why do I still like it here so much?  I don't know!  Maybe it's the women.  Maybe it's the fact that with a little bending and twisting, this country could be so truly excellent.  I have a pipe wrench around here somewhere.

As resident contrarian, please allow me to differ. Greatly.

What dumb-ass playground do you think we are still all on? Do you seriously believe that there are terrorists out there who give a crap about US strategy and actions? They don't. They know that the consequences of their actions are visited upon others -- the citizens of the countries we blow up, in the name of collective punishment. It's beautiful for them, really...they just have to sit back, drug up a 20 year old, shove him into a car, and tell him that 29 (or 63, or whatever the 'magic' number is) virgins are waiting for him on the other side of a 15mm red button. We toss ten thousand bombs into their countries, maim children, and create a whole new generation of recruits. "Wag the dog" usually refers to something else.

Do you think the rest of the world gives a shit about how the US looks when it mobs a country with its Army? Here is the lesson any intelligent planner has learned from this: No one country can stand against America, but America can easily bankrupt itself through the sheer idiocy of pursuing unbelievably expensive foreign policy. A bankrupt America becomes a corrupt American, and this will lead to its decline in the shorter time, rather than the long wait history teaches us is the norm.

What kind of flypaper do we have in Iraq, exactly? Is it the kind that attracts terrorists (you know, the really stupid ones)? Or is it the kind that gets stuck to a world power, sapping resources that are needed elsewhere, compounding domestic problems, and potentially setting off a domino effect that results in a cultural decline?

It's probably a bit of both. Your "can of whup ass" mentality was all fine and fun in the Wild West, and probably worked great in the 'hood. This ain't the hood. We have a lot more to lose than the momentary satisfaction we gain by killing a few idiots, and deposing a few standard despots.

The world isn't going to run out of despots any time soon. It also isn't going to run out of smart terrorists, who are gaining converts, created by our actions, at ten times the rate they were before. And I refuse to back that up with anything other than a gut feeling. You know it's true too.

Do I advocate we do nothing? Of course not. That would be stupid. WWF Smackdown Foreign Policy sounds kick-ass to the Nascar crowd. Woohoo! Now comes the hard part. Put it back together again. There are other ways.

We could have cured AIDS and raised living standards by half in a dozen countries, earning respect worldwide, for less money than two months of this war has cost. Politics and true leadership is about allocation of scarce resources, making hard choices, and going for the maximum effect. It's not about posturing, point-making, and throwing a $300 Billion Finger at the rest of the world, with a follow-on "fuck you if you don't like it. But will you please pay for it anyway?"

It's not that the rest of the world is anti-American. By and large it isn't. It just seems like such a huge waste of potential. So much human capital could have been created, for so much less. With these kinds of expenditures there could have been a third way...a way where the US leads by example, by education, by being reasoned, and right.

Amen, Brothers.

This exercise in fantasy from the state controlled Egyptian press goes a long way toward explaining a lot of the problems that they have. Hat tip:
Daimnation! via Dodgeblogium.

In relation to Johno's comment in a previous post:

1) You are the first person to plausibly explain how a rise in attacks might be considered a "good thing." Thanks for that. And you are right-- it IS good in a sick way, if at all.

2) In the run-up to war, we discussed the possibility that Bush wanted to whack Saddam's government as an example to others. It's not a thesis you hear very often, which is weird because it seems to me to be the single most logical of all reasons for the war. It's like we're the action hero who steps into a room of thugs who've done something bad to him and beats the shit out of the guy nearest the door-- breaks ribs, knocks out teeth, bleeding scalp, disclocated knee, swirly-- and then looks up with blood on his chin and says, "now who's next?"

1) Thank you.

2) While I have been often distracted by the minutia of why this or that reason is right, wrong, or disengenuous; at root my basic support for the war comes from that conclusion. While I think all the reasons that have been given for invading are valid to one degree or other, the core principle at work is that we needed to throw somebody against the wall after 9/11. In a sense the reasons given for the war are not justifications for an invasion of Iraq, they are merely the reasons we picked Iraq to invade.

The war on terror is a Huntingtonian clash of civilizations - on a relatively modest and restrained level. It is a clash of lifestyles. War, on one level, is merely a demonstration that our mojo is stronger than their mojo. If we are to defeat terror - it will happen because we have convinced the Islamic world that:

1. Attacking America is a supremely bad idea. That we will ruin the day of anyone who attacks us, supports those who attack us, or even looks at us funny when someone attacks us.
2. That the Islamic Fundamentalist/Baathist - Pan Arab Nationalist/Let's blow things up because we haven't got our way set of memes is a really bad way to organize your society. Because it either results in 1) above, or because it results in poverty and oppression even when your land sits atop stupendously valuable natural resources.
3. We have created at least one example that a Muslim nation can be reorganized on western lines without destroying the essential muslimness of it.

The terrorists themselves have told us how our limpwristed, ineffectual responses to previous terrorist attacks only encouraged them. It made us look weak. So, the obvious corrolary is that we must look puissant. The political wisdom that covers this situation goes back to Roman times. Be nice, until its time not to be nice. But once you change your MO, go biblical on the m-fs so that they get the idea.

War is a bad thing. But it is often better than all of the alternatives.

If the aliens arrive and challenge the human race to a rock/paper/scissors match.

Last night I watched a re-run of Thursday, Oct 23's "The Daily Show With John Stewart", on which the guest was Walter Isaacson discussing his book, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

I already think "The Daily Show" is one of the best shows on television. The quality of the actual news reportage is incredibly high, as is the quality of the interviews. What other show do you know whose recent guests include Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Rowan Atkinson?

Anyway, last night I had an epiphany. We, the geeks, are in charge and "The Daily Show" is our salon. It's not the Jews. It's not the Illuminati. It's not even Clear Channel. It's the geeks. Last night, for a brief second the mask slipped aside and we revealed our utter hegemony to the world. Last night, while discussing Benjamin Franklin on a basic-cableshow known for fake comedy news stories, Walter Isaacson without fanfare or explanation uttered the word "antinomian."

Damn, it feels good to be in charge.

I frequently disagree with his every "heh" and "indeed," but when he's right, he's right.

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, on those people who believe God will punish us for loving our gay brethren:

"Yeah: No-show for the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or what's going on in North Korea, but he's going to come down from the clouds and hurl lightning bolts if two guys get married."

In a spectacular profile in the New Yorker, head Saturday Night Live writer Tina Fey nails the mercurial nature of fame and legacy. Warning: cussing below the break.

You can be a murderous tyrant and the world will remember you fondly. But fuck one horse and you're a horse-fucker for all eternity.”

In a sick way, the recent shift in targets is a positive sign. It means (hopefully) that the holdover Baathist thugs and imported jihadists are finding that attacking American soldiers and Marines is a very, very, dangerous thing. One thing that the media has been less than efficient in broadcasting is that when one or two American soldiers die in an ambush, the cost to the attackers is often far higher. And many attacks are foiled without American loss of life.

It also means that the counterrevolutionaries are going to be even less popular with the general populace, which can only be a good thing from our point of view.

If we continue to hunt them down, and the people continue to help us do so, things will get better. Remember, we were in a similar situation in Germany for well over a year. Operation Werewolf was killing American and British soldiers from ambush into '46.

What I remember from the pre war build up is that the administration focused on Iraqi efforts to develop WMD. Note that the consensus of all western intelligence agencies (including the French) was that Saddam either had them, or had the capability to develop them. And, of course, he had used them in the past which is certainly an indication that the idea wasn't out of left field.

The other reasons were on the back burner, but never discounted - violation of UN resolutions (18 if I recall correctly), the brutality of the regime, and support for terror. The administration never said that Saddam was directly connected to Al Quaeda, and never said that the WMD threat was imminent.

I think the central point is that after 9/11, we had to whack somebody just to establish a deterrent. Afghanistan didn't count, as it was to small, too weak. Saddam was a perfect target, because of all the reasons that were given. If we are to eliminate terror - and the war was always cast as a war on terror in general, then we have to make large scale changes in the region that is the source of the terror that has hit us hard and that continues to be (albeit smaller) threat today.

We know that Saddam's regime supported terrorists. Groups with links to Al Quaeda are in the northeast of that country, and were before we got there. The connections to Palestinian terror were more obvious.

No one of the reasons given for the invasion of Iraq was perhaps compelling enough to justify an invasion alone. But collectively, and in light of the overall threat from terrorism, Iraq was the logical and necessary choice. The best analogy, I think, for the war on terror is the British crackdown on piracy in the 19th Century, which the United States sometimes collaborated on. Sometimes it involves direct action against pirates, sometimes against the nations that support it - even if those nations didn't help the particular pirates that attacked you. Terrorism is a threat to the west, and it is not localized in one terror group.

Strangely enough, one of my first entries is about terrorism in Iraq. I've long been against the war; it's pretty clear at this point that this Administration "fudged" (to put it gently) a lot of the information used to drive the war authorization process forward. I distinctly remember thinking, at the time that there must be some highly secret intelligence, in Bush's possession. That was the only explanation for his actions. News reports and whatever sources I could read at the time simply didn't support rushing the country into an incredibly expensive war.

If we set aside the WMD aspect, we are left with the continuous claims of the administration before the war that terrorists had taken root in Iraq, and were supported by that government. Iraq did support terror, by paying Palestinian families of martyrs, but that is not the connection that the Administration implied. They implied terror; they implied a direct connection to Al Quaeda (note the spelling of the week).

No significant evidence of such a connection has been found. And yet...over the last few days there has been a serious round of terrorism in Baghdad. There are at least 200 wounded, at least 34 dead. Virtually all of them are Iraqis. This is not, in any shape or form, "resistance" fighting. What resistance murders dozens of its own people to make a "point" against an occupier? If "collaboration" is given as a reason, it is a fiction. The vast majority of the dead are regular Iraqi civilians, not police or anyone else who could be termed a collaborator.

I find the events of the past four days to be one of the strongest indicators we have yet seen of Iraq's former government being involved in terrorism. That they have shifted to this tactic so quickly, and with deadly effects, speaks volumes about who they are, and what they were and are prepared to do.

If new elements in Iraq are responsible for these atrocities, we need to root them out. The Iraqi people don't need foreign elements blowing them up, while they're trying to rebuild a society.