MY BABY, MY BABY!

You’ve got to hand it to the Democrats – the blue ribbon for stupidity, I mean.
If the Republicans are following Richard Nixon’s game plan for disaster, circa 1969, where they are in perfect denial of reality about Iraq, the Democrats are stuck in Hubert Humphrey’s wagon rut about conning the people that there is a moderate solution to the war.

Read My Lips – continued engagement in Iraq will only lead to a regionalization of the conflict, collapse and disaster.

This whole mess is exactly following the Vietnam pattern: a declaration of war based on fraudulent information (Tonkin Gulf Resolution/WMDs) an ill-considered invasion, quagmire, regionalization, popular revolt (I mean HERE!), political collapse leading to impeachment and military collapse. The only distinction is that this time there is no draft to accelerate the process (not yet, anyway).

I saw Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, on TV yesterday and he was repeating the same old moderate, respectable, irrelevant position that we have to accelerate the capacity of the Iraqi army to take over the conflict from the American military. Forget it; there is no Iraqi army, just as there was no South Vietnamese army, just a bunch of colonial auxiliaries to the main show, which is an American show. When we left Vietnam, the puppet government collapsed, and this one will too.

Just as the Vietnam War spread into Cambodia and presaged chaos and slaughter in that country, this one shows signs of spreading into Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The shock is, the political commentators, who were alive during that epoch, seem to have forgotten all the lessons from it, and are now behaving with horror that the same thing is happening all over again.

There’s Only One Solution – an international conference including Iraq’s neighbors including, unfortunately, Iran as well as the European Union, Pakistan and India, and Russia; an international peacekeeping force, and American phased withdrawal. Nothing else is even remotely plausible.

Bush will never consider this, and the Democrats, seeking to present themselves as moderates in hopes of retaking congress, are too afraid of being labeled as unpatriotic.

That means that the pressure will continue to build at the grassroots level, just as it did in the 1960s, sweeping aside both parties, until it finally explodes into mass protests, police repression and the same kind of ugliness the country experienced in 1970.

The only mitigating circumstances might be a general collapse of the Bush administration stemming from endemic corruption. The Libby/Rove mess could expand to engulf Cheney. Senate Majority Leader Frist could be indicted for insider trading, following House Leader DeLay’s indictment. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Alito could be shot down due to past conflict of interest and, finally, Bush himself could be dragged into the mess for any one of a number of reasons (take your choice: Judith Miller, pre-war intelligence, failing to act on 9/11 information).

The Republicans themselves might determine Bush to be a liability to their future prospects and initiate impeachment proceedings. That would be my guess. In the event Bush gets impeached, the war in Iraq would collapse and chaos would ensue.

I have no problem with taking over Iraqi oil reserves. Certainly, the Iraqis are not sympathetic victims. But the simple facts of the case are that it never could have succeeded, it has brought out the worst in us as a people, that it has made us look like imbeciles and buffoons in the eyes of the world and it has caused us to throw money and soldiers into a bottomless black hole.

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Posted on 11/16/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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