Informant38

Nigh :

...the absurdity of nearly everything Bush, Cheney, Feith, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Bolton, et al. represent is now apparent to almost everyone besides themselves.
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As a result of the Iraq war, we should thank the Bush administration for demonstrating the futility and cruelty of war as the Pentagon and its contractors have designed it.
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The natural plan B of modern war is more modern war--more death, more injuries, more devastation. But we were supposed to be the Iraqis' friends, and so...
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The geniuses at the Pentagon who thought of "outsourcing" military operations for fun and profit didn't reckon with how the subject population would experience whole different sets of Americans doing lots of different and contradictory things, creating chaos and sowing more and more fear.
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What is the good news? It is that non-white and/or non-privileged men and women are rising to power here and there
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But we all know that white men do not give up power easily, and in this case they just might decide to blow everything up rather than change their way of looking at things. Is attacking Iran the beginning of the end?
If so, and if Bush and Cheney order the attack, then history will say that those of us who didn't stop them deserved what we got.

Jane Smiley/Huffington 13.Feb.07
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Kansas: Anti-Evolution Guidelines Are Repealed
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Kansas: Irony
Evolution being the selection, and de-selection, of organisms by their environment, the current rejection of de-selection in all its forms except for some reason in the mass-death of children in automobiles would appear to be firmly, if not exactly consciously, anti-evolutionary.
We believe in evolution, but we don't believe in experiencing it anymore, except by our express permission, or by accident.
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Minor quake jolts southeastern Iran
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Iran Bomb Targets Revolutionary Guards; 11 Die
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The radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is said to have fled Iraq and sought shelter in Iran ahead of a US crackdown aimed at ending the violence in the country.
Mr Sadr and his senior Mahdi army commanders left Baghdad two weeks ago after the prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, said he could not guarantee their safety, a senior Iraqi official said.
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Washington believes the Mahdi army is the biggest threat to Iraq's security and has urged Mr Maliki to disarm it, although Mr Sadr is one of the prime minister's closest political allies.

Howard-McAskill/GuardianUK 14.Feb.07
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GuardianUK 15.Apr.04:

An Iranian diplomat was today assassinated in Baghdad in a gun attack on his car near the Iranian embassy.
It was not clear whether the murder was connected to a visit to Iraq today by a senior Iranian envoy who is trying to mediate an end to the US standoff with radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

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The only way the Bush Administration has demonstrated Smiley's "the futility and cruelty of war" is on its own terms. Men who have proven themselves publicly to be dishonest, to be outright liars if the need arises. Smiley says "we were supposed to be the Iraqis' friends" and this is meant to point up the absurd failure of the Bush campaign in Iraq. Smiley says "different sets of Americans doing lots of different and contradictory things, creating chaos and sowing more and more fear", and this is meant to point up the incompetence and lack of "genius" of the Pentagon and their campaign in Iraq, which is assumed to be part of the Bush campaign there. She places Feith and Wolfowitz inside a phrase of accusation that's bookended by Bush and Bolton, itself a kind of progress in that it took over three years to get to the point where those two men - erstwhile Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - could even be mentioned as central to the matter.
But Smiley's whole premise is the proffered one, the official one, the story, the frame of intention that was put up from the beginning.
Go to Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein, and create democracy.
This has failed.
But the failure is to the stated goals of men who are proven liars - corrupt and dishonest men who have shown themselves willing to embrace absurdity and contradiction to get what they're after. Why continue to debate it on their terms?
Because it's easier, and far less dangerous than debating the possibility that this was intended, every step of it, from the fragmenting of Iraq to the demonizing of al-Sadr, who must always be described as a "radical" cleric and a "firebrand".
The absurdity of near-unanimous condemnation of the Iraq invasion co-existing with the passive acceptance of the persecution of Al-Sadr by the same criminal gangs that designed and prosecuted the invasion is greater than the absurdity of Cheney and Bush in their entirety as failed human beings.
If the invasion was wrong then resistance to the invasion can't be wrong as well.
Yet these ideas exist in many people's minds side by side.
Yuppies across the US, or whatever nickname the comfortable non-conservatives wear now, are united in their knowing cynical disdain for the absurdities of all this grotesque nonsense, until that knowing threatens to put them at actual risk. Then it's time to wait and see.
Placing the urge to action in a frame that only allows an attack on Bush and Cheney is a childishly easy stance to take. Mixing up the bag, the way it was planned we do, so that each player is relatively equal and they all represent some vaporous conspiracy with Bush and Cheney at its heart, is weak. And it paves the way with good intention for someone like Hillary Clinton to pick up Bush's dropped torch as if it were her own, and carry on.
Clinton was in New Hampshire last week responding to a challenge on her disgusting hypocrisy about the Iraq invasion, during which she did a little bantam strut and boasted about "capping" the numbers of troops in Iraq. At a time when the military's upped its waivers of criminal disqualifications in new recruits by 65%.
This will keep things just as they are in Iraq.
Smiley's whole premise breaks down under the obvious weight of this - this now, these conditions, the numbers of the war dead, that, how it is in Iraq right now, the chaos, the terror, the murk and ruin and helplessness - under the weight of it being what was desired all along.
Then it isn't failure, then it isn't absurd, then it's success. Evil gloating and triumphant, instead of evil stumbling in confusion.
But it means you have to ask who did it, who really did it, and you have to answer that, then you have to go on, knowing the answer - and then what?
Much easier to use Bush for the purpose he was presented as - sock puppet, scapegoat, sin-eater.

It isn't absurd if this is what they wanted.
And it is what they wanted.
But who are they?
Not only white men - no one gives up power easily, unless it's to get more.
Ask Wolfowitz and Feith.