I guess I’m just supposed to get annoyed at the president — Rove and the boys just love getting a rise out of people like me. Though I hate to encourage them, it is irritating as hell to watch or hear Dubya at one of his press conferences. I mean, there’s something about an obvious idiot talking down to you that is just innately insulting. Then, of course, there’s the scummy substance of what he has to say… like suggesting that he’s only “protecting the troops” when he openly attempts to provoke Iran, thereby pissing off about half of the Shi’a Muslims in Iraq (in other words, 30% of the population). In a country where a majority already supports armed attacks against U.S. troops, how is this a good idea? Then there’s Bush’s speculation about how history will judge us if we “fail” in Iraq — let that happen and future generations will ask, “Where were they?” (Huh?) That’s the boy in the bubble talking… and he’s talking out his ass. We’re the people of the future with respect to his decision to start this disastrous war four years ago. What the hell are we saying right now?

It’s hard to say if Dubya is aware of it or not (there may be no institutional reason why he should be), but there is one narrow sense in which what he says is true. Future “deciders” — those who will inherit the dilapidated machinery of empire that Bush is now driving into the ground — might well deplore the failure of his Iraq project. It has, after all, been a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy planning to exert strong influence over the energy-rich Middle East, going back to at least World War II. So long as the region’s oil remains one of the world’s greatest strategic assets, our commissars will want to exercise control over it if only to maintain the option of denying those resources to our principal economic competitors. Defeat in Iraq — i.e. the U.S. abandoning its plans for a permanent presence and a congenial client state there — would mean a significant loss of influence in that part of the world. High stakes indeed for the imperial mandarin class.

Assuming for a moment that Bush knows this to be true, why would he risk this invasion and how could he have been so blind to the obvious dangers? Well… I think of it as somewhat like the plot of The Producers. I mean, you got Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom just so damn certain that “Springtime for Hitler” was going to be an immediate flop, they essentially bet the store on it. Bush and company had that kind of confidence in the success of their Iraq adventure. Remember, they were coming off of the invasion of Afghanistan (real easy to beat, because it had been blown up numerous times already), and they had the same visions of an easy victory chief executives have dreamed of since Desert Storm… even back to the Six-Day War. A few encouraging words from a drunk named “curve ball” and it’s Fuck, we can’t lose! So now what? Blow up the theater? Starting to look like it.

I know some watery liberals are almost afraid that the “surge” will succeed. They might remind themselves what success looks like. It looks like Fallujah. It looks like Guatemala. It looks like Afghanistan. That kind of success is truly something to fear.

On a week when most of the mass media have been obsessing over love-crazed astronauts and tabloid corpses, it’s almost easy to forget that there are a couple of bloody neo-colonial wars going on, and that one of them is on the verge of a significant escalation in violence. Oh, well, we’re supposed to say… what’s on the other channels? The less we focus on this growing catastrophe, the better off our leaders will be. They’ve already made certain we won’t be called upon to fight if we don’t want to, and that all of the costs will be deferred until long after they leave office to their opulent retirement consultancies (Uncle Carlucci! Keep that chair warm for me!) A little high fructose news-food puts icing on the multi-layer cake of denial they’ve baked up for us — devil’s food, for sure. And yet, at the same time, the Iraq war story keeps growing larger and larger, its lethal tentacles stretching into every corner of American life, destined to touch each one of us, whether we like it or not.

With respect to that, there were some non-tabloid stories in the news this week as well. One was the Pentagon inspector general’s report on the Office of Special Plans — that raw intelligence stovepiping shop run by snot-nosed neocon Doug Feith (now on to bigger and better things, thank you very much). Seems even the Pentagon may be getting around (four years too late) to recognizing that putting ideologically-driven morons in charge of policy is maybe not such a great idea. That won’t stop us from doing it again, mind you. Our new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose job it once was to exaggerate Soviet military capabilities, is making much of some fragmentary evidence that Iranian munitions may be making their way into Iraq. Well, there’s a surprise. I have to think that if a provenance were found for each item of explosives in that sorry country, someone other than Iran would top the list. Jesus Christmas — isn’t it just too fucking obvious that this administration (and really any administration) will bend the facts to their own purposes whenever they see fit?

It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which the principal boosters of this war will engage in rhetorical gymnastics in order to prove themselves right in some small measure. Chuck Krauthammer is exemplary of the war planners’ three-strike process to the hell we live in today. Strike one: scare talk about a grave and gathering threat — Saddam’s dreaded nuclear weapons that Krauthammer and others insisted we must “pre-empt”. Strike two: triumphalist blather just following the fall of Baghdad about the glorious “three week war”. Strike three: shifting the blame to the Iraqis and domestic opponents of the war, whom Krauthammer attempts to portray as possessed of a kind of paternalistic, colonial attitude that in effect discriminates against Iraqis by suggesting that America is the author of the current catastrophe, not the Iraqis themselves (who, according to Krauthammer, “chose” civil war). That’s the trajectory of both the administration and the congressional leaders who bought into the 2003 invasion, and if we’re not careful, that is the kind of thinking that will define the debate in the coming election.

This is the time to resist — not just this attempt to blame Iraqis, but also the associated effort to attack Iran. They’ve had their three strikes. It’s our turn to drive this debate.

luv u,

jp