PRESIDENT PELOSI ??!!!

Nancy Pelosi for president? Now I know you’ve lost your mind!

Maybe, but she’s closer than you think.

I may be nasty, but I’ve always been interested in history. And the historical panorama of the world is no further than your local library. As my mentor and inspiration, Frank Zappa, once was famously quoted to say, you don’t need no university to learn. Just go to the library and read a book. And what the history books tell us is that the Iraq war is so unwinnable as to be cast into the realm of illusion.

During the lightning expansion of Islam from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh and eighth centuries AD, the first territory to be conquered was Mesopotamia, the present day Iraq. Tribes from Arabia moved into Iraq and took over completely from its Persian and Anatolian rulers.

With the death of the Prophet Muhammad, there developed a schism in Islam between those who believed that the new religion should be ruled by the actual blood descendants of the prophet, the Shi’ites, and those who believed that any righteous Muslim who had lived a rigorous life of morality was fit to lead. These adherents came to be known as Sunnis.

These true believers have fought many wars for ascendancy, and they were not shy about cutting off heads and exploding bombs to advance their beliefs.

This is the fundamental truth about the history of Iraq, and any foreign power that believes that it can move in and play one sect against the other is destined to become just another piece of meat in a meat grinder that has been churning for fifteen hundred years.

The only analogy that comes to mind as it applies to us would be if a foreign power had tried to invade the United States during our own civil war of 1861-65 and tried to restore order. Anybody who would have tried that would have immediately been hacked to pieces by both the Union and Confederate sides. Unfortunately the dynamics of civil war do not allow for third-party interlopers.

By moving into Iraq and unsettling the status quo we opened a Pandora’s box of demons who will first try to eliminate the barriers trying to keep them from hacking each other to pieces. The useless puppet government we set up there is under an immediate sentence of death from both sides, and that is why they are wholeheartedly trying to steal as much as they can as soon as possible, so that they can live peaceably in Damascus or in the south of France as soon as their situation becomes untenable. And I don’t blame them. I myself would be looking to steal as much as possible while the getting was good.

The second set of dynamics at play is that of the colonial powers who have in the past attempted to instill their idea of order in a colonial society. The two recent instances that come to mind, the Russians in Afghanistan and the French in Algeria, both ended the same way, with domestic political chaos. The Afghanistan debacle led directly to the collapse of the whole Soviet political system. The French, also experiencing political meltdown, were forced to literally beg Charles De Gaulle to take control and restore order. De Gaulle’s power in this situation was so complete that as a condition for assuming power he literally forced the French politicians to re-write the French constitution, centralizing all power in his hands, before he finally assumed control and effectively abandoned Algeria (although he achieved a very good bargain from the Algerian revolutionaries).

The way things stand for the United States right now; we have nobody with the immense stature of De Gaulle to take control. What we have is a bunch of dwarfs. Nevertheless, the Democrats have made the first baby steps toward extricating us from the chaos by passing resolutions mandating military withdrawal from Iraq.

Unfortunately, the people who ascribe our invasion of Iraq as a naked grab for oil are giving the Bush administration too much credit for rational thinking. Because if that were the case, there would have been a lot more effective ways to get our hooks into the oil. Unfortunately the confused reasons ascribed to invading the place, weapons of mass destruction, saving the Kurds, punishing Saddam Hussein, installing democracy and all the other half-baked opium dreams advanced by middlebrow neo-conservative idiots go a lot farther in explaining the waste of our nation’s precious wealth and the health of our trusting personnel, who have been so ill-served by the morons who thrust them into this morass.

The way things stand right now, Congress will push for a withdrawal date in a conference of the two houses that will arrive at a resolution that has teeth to it. We must be out by such-and-such a date. Bush, who is increasingly isolated, will cave in to his base and veto the bill.

When this happens, he will come under irresistible pressure from the twenty Republican senators who are up for re-election next year to advance his own plan for withdrawal. If Bush does not go far enough to satisfy the majority of people in this country who are disgusted with his prosecution of the war, and if the 20 Republican senators who are up for re-election determine that they are in jeopardy of losing their seats, then the push for impeachment will begin, though the Republicans will stay in the background and let the Democrats take the heat for it.

If the House of Representatives determines that Bush’s impeachment has a decent chance to succeed, then they will assemble a bill of particulars called Articles of Impeachment and pass it, to send to the Senate for a full-blown trial. The Senate, after debate and a trial will vote to convict Bush. In that case, the first in line to succeed him would be his hostile and irrational vice-president, Cheney.

Which is why I believe that any Articles of Impeachment will also include Cheney’s name as an afterthought.

Next in line would be Speaker Pelosi, who would be installed as a lame-duck president just months prior to a general election. I believe that the liberal Pelosi, representing the much-reviled citizens of San Francisco, would be perceived to be a delectable choice for the Republicans to run against. And she would present them with the added advantage of derailing a run by Hillary Clinton and her husband, whom the Republicans both fear and loathe.

To me this scenario makes eminent sense. I can’t figure out why the astronomically-paid deep thinkers who bring our news and opinion to us have not even explored this possibility.

Remember, you heard if first from 200motels.

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Posted on 4/4/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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