by Drew J Jones
Fri Nov 24th, 2006 at 06:20:58 AM EST
Wrote this in a response to an old friend and (brief) bandmate of mine, Jessica, who accuses our new, super-hot Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi of wanting to "cut-and-run" from Iraq, tax and spend, not enforce our immigration laws, and "usher in a return to feminist milestones" (which is, I guess, a bad thing in the Wingnut-o-sphere). You're, obviously meant to sing the title of this diary to the tune of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride"....
Poor Jessica. Her political party was, as we all know, slaughtered seventeen days ago. (Winds of history and all that.) And now she feels the need to bash Speaker-elect Pelosi. Time for another round of Drew Debunks Republican Horseshit, I suppose.
One would think that after five years of the press drooling over that incomptent little shit in the White House, Republican voters would get the hint that the "liberal media" their leaders out in Wingnuttia always talk about is nothing more than a bogeyman. Totalitarians always need bogeymen, whether they be Stalinist-era Communist Party members in the Soviet Union talking of infiltration by capitalist sympathizers. Or National Socialists -- better known, of course, as Nazis -- blaming Germany's WWI loss on liberals and Jews. Or Mao's disastrous fight against "counterrevolutionaries" back in the mid-20th Century.
Craving Hank Kissinger's Salted Peanuts
Or the far less crazy, but still dangerous, current incarnation of the Republican Party -- always in need of a bogeyman. I'm not sure what, exactly, they're afraid Pelosi will push through. (Mandatory veganism?) Nobody is going to pull out of Iraq anytime soon, because we have the "liberal media" providing a constant stream on St. John McCain's Magical Pony Plan for Iraq.®
McCain, for those of you who haven't read it, wants to send 20-40,000 more troops. (One problem, Johnnykins: We don't have enough troops to do that. Next in line, please.) The press, as I said, eats this garbage up, pretending as though McCain is anything other than a conservative ideologue still refighting Vietnam in Iraq. (We would never have won Vietnam without nuking Hanoi. The same is true of Iraq, except that Hanoi is, of course, replaced by Baghdad.) The lesson of Vietnam -- the one Bush and his neocon handlers are too blinded to learn -- is that a true superpower can admit a mistake, move on and know that history shall eventually see the world coming down on its side in the larger struggle if we are truly correct.
We lost the battle in Vietnam, but we won the war, and this, too, shall be the case in Iraq one day. Today Vietnam, while still run by the Communists, is "renovated" (their term, not mine) and booming -- although it is struggling with several critical issues, particularly unemployment. But, in the end, the South won. And, one day, Iraq will be a democracy. It will enjoy the freedoms we apparently want to provide.
But back to the present: The Republicans lost this war. They started it, and they lost it. Could the Dems have won it if in the GOP's position? No, because no one in Washington -- the president being the worst case of all -- understood the dynamics of Iraq sufficiently. Bush recently admitted that, prior to the invasion, he did not know there were Sunnis and Shi'ia. That should be an impeachable offense. I knew there were Sunnis and Shi'ia, and that they hated each other, and I'm just some loud-mouthed asshole of a university student on a notebook. But, even if I hadn't known this, I'm not the President of the United States, for Christ's sake. I'm not the one with the power to press the red button.
If you don't understand even the basic idea of a long-standing conflict between Sunnis and Shi'ia, yet still think of yourself as an intelligent person in discussions of the War On Terrorism,TM -- as is the case with most pundits -- we're doomed to repeat this mistake. Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda are Sunnis from Saudi Arabia. (Saudi Arabia. You know the place: Almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were from that country and "educated" there. It's also the country Republicans love to love in their realpolitik fantasies.) Iran, to take another example since Republicans always try to tie it to bin Laden, is a theocracy run by Shi'ia. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are actually advocates of Shi'ia persecution -- clearly a sign (note: sarcasm) that bin Laden is a natural ally of Ayatollah Khamenei.
The Shi'ia and Sunnis have been facing off for centuries. Bush chose to not educate himself on this, and now we have 140,000 troops stuck in between the two sides, at a financial cost approaching £530 billion.
Call it "cut-and-run," but I know that I, for one, would not send my kid to Iraq, nor would I volunteer to go to Iraq, and I suspect the same is true of the people who use the "cut-and-run" meme. If not, your next stop should be GoArmy.com, where you can set up an appointment to enlist -- that is, of course, so long as you're not a homosexual. (Drug addiction is fine, though.) Or, if you're really dying to see combat, ARNG.Army.mil is apparently your best bet.
