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

Am I dreaming, or did Joe Biden just blow another presidential bid with that big yap of his? I feel like I’ve been transported back to 1987, when the old media knockout machine first kicked into high gear. First it was Gary Hart, presumptive front-runner, derailed because of what — some kind of heterosexual liaison with an adult woman? God, no! He was out of there, his morals not up to the high standard set by the ersatz Hollywood cowboy then ensconced in the White House — a man who had cavorted with the likes of Errol Flynn back in the day, for chrissake. Then Biden got caught cribbing British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock, and he was out. Would that work today? Not as well as Biden’s clumsily phrased comment that seemed to suggest Obama is cleaner and more palatable to, well, white people. The insufferable NPR Morning Edition team brought up Obama’s comment that he did not take the remark personally, about which one of them commented, well, why should he? It wasn’t about him. Ummm… well, yeah, it was about him, if the comment was a reference to “blackness” in general.

Anyway, that’s Joe Biden. Less newsworthy, apparently, is his contention (which he shares with nearly all of his fellow Democratic presidential contenders) that the Iraqis need to, in essence, get their shit together. This is positioning for our eventual exit from Iraq. It’s the same exit strategy we applied to the Vietnam War — blame the victims, as though what we did to them was something we did for them. That’s the Vilsack line, as well, and of course Hillary is all about “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government, etc. Meanwhile on the other side of the aisle, the “hang tough” Republicans (all safely beyond fighting age, one might notice) have added “benchmarks” to their resolution of support for Bush’s escalation, though the rhetoric is still designed to set their opponents up for blame when (not if) this “strategy” doesn’t work. And when it doesn’t work, you can bet it will be because people just slightly to the left of them doubted it, and not because it is an utterly bankrupt policy.

Yes indeed, you can see the outlines of a “knife in the back” explanation for our failure in Iraq when the war is finally over. Again, this is Vietnam redux. Those antiwar protesters, press critics, and wishy-washy liberals emboldened the enemy, undermined our troops, compromised the mission, stabbed the president in the back, etc. Hey, it worked great for Nixon… and for Hitler, come to think of it. Mark my words — this catastrophe will be blamed upon the very people who counseled most strongly against it in the first place. We will be lumped together with everyone from Osama and the crew to those French “surrender monkeys,” whose Gaullist president Jacques Chirac recently had the temerity to suggest that an Iranian nuclear weapon would not be the disaster the U.S. makes it out to be, since its use would result in Teheran’s utter and immediate annihilation by the enormous Israeli and U.S. nuclear arsenals. (The Morning Edition crew seemed utterly flabbergasted at this remark, as if they’d never heard anything so outlandish as the concept of nuclear deterrence that we’ve lived by since the start of the Cold War.)

So by all means, oppose this stupid war. But don’t for one minute suppose that you’ll be thanked for it later. As my mom always told me, no good deed goes unpunished.