Not buying it

Driving to work this morning, I heard Brookings fellow and noted liberal war hawk Michael O’Hanlon on NPR tell me that things in Iraq are getting better because the violence was down 75% from last year. OK, I am not here to dispute statistics but really, give me a fucking break. Things are 75% less horrible than they were last year because we flooded parts of the country with soldiers. Those soldiers, however, are preparing to rotate out with no replacements to follow. So this fantastic 75% reduction in mayhem, death and destruction is only temporary. Even worse, the political solutions that the extra security was supposed to buy never materialized. Indeed, Maliki is weak and incompetent, Sadr is preparing to get back in the game and unleash his hordes once again, oil and even territorial disputes are nowhere near resolved, and the Green Zone is taking rocket and mortar fire daily.

Look, the situation in Iraq is utterly, thoroughly fucked up. So when people like O’Hanlon, people who have staked their reputations on this misadventure, start telling us that things are getting better, we need to understand that they are full of shit. They are either willfully denying the truth or completely clueless to the situation altogether. Upton Sinclair once said that it is very difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on not understanding it. That notion is epidemic, even fundamental, to this pro-war crowd and shame on them for it.

So after embeds, Shock and Awe, the death of Saddam, the Provisional Authority, Cheney’s “last throes”, turning Bush’s corner God knows how many times, the mighty Purple Finger of Suffrage, Ahmad Chalabi, Abu Ghraib, 4000 soldiers dead, tens of thousands more wounded and uncountable numbers of Iraqi causalities to boot, these incorrigible war mongers still demand that we listen to them because they are serious, conscientious thinkers. I say FUCK THAT. Being so wrong, so often should deprive this crowd of any credibility on the subject of Iraq. So I played Rancid’s “Wrongful Suspicion” on repeat until it scrubbed all of Mr. O’Hanlon’s nonsense out of my brain.

Broken bones, broken rules
They can all be fixed (oh yeah)
So let those who battle with the pen
And the others with the fist (its the gospel now)
The strong ones will be defiant with words that can convince
You can take this as rules but I'll take it as a dis.