Whiskey or death?
Aug. 5th, 2005 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ebonlockThe Poorman lays out his understanding of the case for war in Iraq.
My understanding of the hermetic case for war, which could not be overtly explained to the American people, went something like this: firstly, there is terrorism because of local political conditions, and that a solution to these terrorism-inducing conditions is liberal democracy. This is simplistic, but I think there’s a great deal to this. Now, admittedly, I don’t really know shit about the Middle East, but, in this bold new world, I’m expected to have all kinds of opinions about things and places and people that I don’t know shit about, so, for what it’s worth, my opinion is that there’s probably a significant amount of truth to this. Again, as this was buried under mountains of bullshit about WMD and secret Prague meetings and so on, I might not have grasped every nuance here, but this was my understanding.
And here was the second part: the way to bring democracy to the Middle East is by invading Iraq, toppling Saddam, clearing away the roses and candy, and going home in time for Thanksgiving. The Iraqis will be eternally grateful, and a great wave of democracy whisky sexy will spread out over the entire Muslim world until it reaches the non-Muslim world, at which point, I gather, it will stop. (Then we will cure African poverty by invading Zambia, I suppose.) This part never made a whole lot of sense to me, or to anybody, really, which is why we had to keep hearing about those fucking aluminum tubes.
Watching the overt case for war fall apart was like watching a fat man do a bellyflop into an empty swimming pool - kind of funny, in a perverse way, but mostly just painful to watch. I was prepared for the lack of connections to al Qaeda, so that was no big surprise, although finding a country in the Middle East that has that little to do with the deaths of 3,000 people on 9/11 is kind of an accomplishment. I figured that Iraq didn’t have much in the way of a nuclear program, because that should have been relatively easy to find, but what kind of country doesn’t have any chemical weapons at all? If you had asked me before the war to name a country that had really had literally zero chemical weapons, I would probably have said “I don’t know, like, Andorra, maybe”, and if you asked me today, I would have to say “Iraq, and maybe Andorra”. I still don’t get that. I’d much rather be tasked with making some poison chemicals that making, say, a rifle - pour bleach and hydrochloric acid in your bathtub, and you’ve got chlorine gas, and you can enjoy in the privacy of your own unventilated bathroom the same protracted death as unknown thousands of soldiers in WWI. Now, making it into something that can be delivered on the battlefield is presumably harder, and I’ve got no clue how you do it, but come on. Tweakers with no teeth who haven’t slept since 2002 manage to make high-quality methamphetamine in a rural Kentucky outhouse, and an oil-rich nation of millions can’t even field a few crappy chlorine gas canisters? I’m rambling a bit here, but the drop from impending mushroom clouds to jack fucking shit is a hell of a fall. I’m just saying.
This was a problem for most Americans, which is why there needed to be that progression of feebler and feebler excuses for where the billions of ultra-deadly WMD had got off to, but it was no problem for the illuminati. For if you were among the special few who grasped, however belatedly, that the real purpose of the war was to democratize the entire Muslim world in one fell blow, you understood that true success was just around the corner. True success would come when Iraq became a stable, peaceful, multiethnic pro-American democracy, and anyone who thought this wasn’t just around the corner was a huge racist. But a funny thing happened on the way to vindication.
[...]
What this means is that there are a large number of baddies, more than four, and they must be boldly battled with big army weapons, not wussy detective work and due process and so on. The major proof-of-concept for the recondite theory was Iraq, which is currently either in, or slipping into, civil war, despite all the corners turned and the lights at the end of tunnels and All The Good News You Aren’t Hearing About. So either the project to turn Iraq into a wonderful, stable democracy is a failure, blue fingers nonwithstanding; or Iraq is currently a democracy, and terrorism has gone through the roof. Either way, not the sort of thing that gives one much confidence. Thankfully, we can still get pissed off by 9/11.
Maybe I’m being unfair here - it wouldn’t be the first time. But I’m trying to see what’s going on here, and I’m trying to figure out why the posterboy for everything wrong with the Middle East is suddenly persona non grata in the catalog of hateful Muslims, and I’m not getting any direction here. The case for war seems to have metastasized from a case that could be expressed, although not very convincingly, into something ineffable - that je ne sais quoi that comes to you when you look at pictures of mayhem and horror, some kind of foreign policy jazz where if you have to ask, you’ll never understand. It’s inadequate, it’s evasive, and it’s pathetic.
And it’s not that it’s inadequate for me. There has been a cost for this insistance on the use of violence, and the cost has not been borne primarily by webloggers feeling protective of their pet theories. The cost has been borne by our soldiers, and especially by the people of Iraq, and the cost has been staggering. This was not unpredictable - it was a given when you insisted on war...
My understanding of the hermetic case for war, which could not be overtly explained to the American people, went something like this: firstly, there is terrorism because of local political conditions, and that a solution to these terrorism-inducing conditions is liberal democracy. This is simplistic, but I think there’s a great deal to this. Now, admittedly, I don’t really know shit about the Middle East, but, in this bold new world, I’m expected to have all kinds of opinions about things and places and people that I don’t know shit about, so, for what it’s worth, my opinion is that there’s probably a significant amount of truth to this. Again, as this was buried under mountains of bullshit about WMD and secret Prague meetings and so on, I might not have grasped every nuance here, but this was my understanding.
And here was the second part: the way to bring democracy to the Middle East is by invading Iraq, toppling Saddam, clearing away the roses and candy, and going home in time for Thanksgiving. The Iraqis will be eternally grateful, and a great wave of democracy whisky sexy will spread out over the entire Muslim world until it reaches the non-Muslim world, at which point, I gather, it will stop. (Then we will cure African poverty by invading Zambia, I suppose.) This part never made a whole lot of sense to me, or to anybody, really, which is why we had to keep hearing about those fucking aluminum tubes.
Watching the overt case for war fall apart was like watching a fat man do a bellyflop into an empty swimming pool - kind of funny, in a perverse way, but mostly just painful to watch. I was prepared for the lack of connections to al Qaeda, so that was no big surprise, although finding a country in the Middle East that has that little to do with the deaths of 3,000 people on 9/11 is kind of an accomplishment. I figured that Iraq didn’t have much in the way of a nuclear program, because that should have been relatively easy to find, but what kind of country doesn’t have any chemical weapons at all? If you had asked me before the war to name a country that had really had literally zero chemical weapons, I would probably have said “I don’t know, like, Andorra, maybe”, and if you asked me today, I would have to say “Iraq, and maybe Andorra”. I still don’t get that. I’d much rather be tasked with making some poison chemicals that making, say, a rifle - pour bleach and hydrochloric acid in your bathtub, and you’ve got chlorine gas, and you can enjoy in the privacy of your own unventilated bathroom the same protracted death as unknown thousands of soldiers in WWI. Now, making it into something that can be delivered on the battlefield is presumably harder, and I’ve got no clue how you do it, but come on. Tweakers with no teeth who haven’t slept since 2002 manage to make high-quality methamphetamine in a rural Kentucky outhouse, and an oil-rich nation of millions can’t even field a few crappy chlorine gas canisters? I’m rambling a bit here, but the drop from impending mushroom clouds to jack fucking shit is a hell of a fall. I’m just saying.
This was a problem for most Americans, which is why there needed to be that progression of feebler and feebler excuses for where the billions of ultra-deadly WMD had got off to, but it was no problem for the illuminati. For if you were among the special few who grasped, however belatedly, that the real purpose of the war was to democratize the entire Muslim world in one fell blow, you understood that true success was just around the corner. True success would come when Iraq became a stable, peaceful, multiethnic pro-American democracy, and anyone who thought this wasn’t just around the corner was a huge racist. But a funny thing happened on the way to vindication.
[...]
What this means is that there are a large number of baddies, more than four, and they must be boldly battled with big army weapons, not wussy detective work and due process and so on. The major proof-of-concept for the recondite theory was Iraq, which is currently either in, or slipping into, civil war, despite all the corners turned and the lights at the end of tunnels and All The Good News You Aren’t Hearing About. So either the project to turn Iraq into a wonderful, stable democracy is a failure, blue fingers nonwithstanding; or Iraq is currently a democracy, and terrorism has gone through the roof. Either way, not the sort of thing that gives one much confidence. Thankfully, we can still get pissed off by 9/11.
Maybe I’m being unfair here - it wouldn’t be the first time. But I’m trying to see what’s going on here, and I’m trying to figure out why the posterboy for everything wrong with the Middle East is suddenly persona non grata in the catalog of hateful Muslims, and I’m not getting any direction here. The case for war seems to have metastasized from a case that could be expressed, although not very convincingly, into something ineffable - that je ne sais quoi that comes to you when you look at pictures of mayhem and horror, some kind of foreign policy jazz where if you have to ask, you’ll never understand. It’s inadequate, it’s evasive, and it’s pathetic.
And it’s not that it’s inadequate for me. There has been a cost for this insistance on the use of violence, and the cost has not been borne primarily by webloggers feeling protective of their pet theories. The cost has been borne by our soldiers, and especially by the people of Iraq, and the cost has been staggering. This was not unpredictable - it was a given when you insisted on war...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 07:20 pm (UTC)*I* knew that the administration was talking bullshit, anyone with a small amount of intelligence and the willingness to acquaint themselves with the requirements for producing nuclear weapons knew they were bullshitting. And if it was a human rights issue, well, I can list a LOT of places with more brutal killings and greater oppression than Saddam's Iraq, nasty place though it was.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-05 08:08 pm (UTC)