Archduke Ferdinand sighted in Jordan - headed for the border
I have a little trouble with Dreyfuss' sarcastic/ironic close. There's an element of back-handed complicity to it. "Oh well, nothing we can do now."In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."
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It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated, and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq on the knife's edge.
Like the Sarajevo assassination that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won't be the cause. The cause is far more deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and America's deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions. If the current crisis doesn't spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.
Robert Dreyfuss/TomPaine 24.Feb.06
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link path robotwisdom > James Wolcott
As always the yeoman task is to get in front of them, not just bite them in the back of the ankles or bark furiously while you run to keep up, though that is a help.
But get in front of them. Pretend this is what they wanted, that it's not an accident, or the result of incompetence.
They're proven liars, cynical manipulators, heartless amoral predators and delusional cultists. And those are just the ones we can see.
Pretend they wanted an Iraq on fire. So that they could what- step in further? Justify the lack of anything like a viable economy or political infrastructure?
Justify some new, more apocalyptic, more devastating attack?
Is it so they could goad the already furious Muslim world into some technical foul of aggression, some act that violates established international law?
Not that international law is anything more than a convenience now. Not that they haven't already violated every letter and spirit of international law themselves.
But that's the binary - either it's out of control or it isn't.
If it's out of control, if Iraq is on fire and nobody wanted it to be - then we need to focus our outrage and dismay on fools who should be shoved out of the way.
If it's intentional, if Iraq is on fire and the next moves are already lined out and prepared for - then we need to focus our outrage and dismay on villains who should be taken down before they take us all down with them.
