Riverbend posted again yesterday. Here is how she started out her post.
You know your country is in trouble when:
1. The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
2. Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
3. The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
4. The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
5. An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country’s ‘Golden Years’.
6. Your country is purportedly ‘selling’ 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.
7. For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it’s going to cut back on providing that hour.
8. Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is ‘sectarian bloodshed’ or ‘civil war’.
9. People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that’s been missing for two weeks.
The rest of it is even harder to read. She’s come to the conclusion that American officials have intentionally brought Iraq to this low point. She doesn’t really have a hypothesis for why we would do this but she can’t believe it was an accident. Moreover, she has an interesting theory on why we executed Saddam now.
My only conclusion is that the Americans want to withdraw from Iraq, but would like to leave behind a full-fledged civil war because it wouldn’t look good if they withdraw and things actually begin to improve, would it?
I have to confess, that possibility never occurred to me. It doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I am naive, but my confusion is rooted in something different. I simply cannot understand why Bush continues to set the bar for success at such an impossibly high level. He keeps insisting that Iraq be a stable democracy that can defend itself, root out terrorists, and pose no threat to their neighbors. He keeps talking about victory. Why?
I do have a cynical side. Sometimes I wonder whether we wanted to break Iraq into a million pieces as a way of assuring that it never again can fire a scud missile at Tel Aviv. But I just can’t quite believe that the people that run our government would put a higher priority on accomplishing that goal than they would on developing the oil fields. Why empower Iran, suffer ignominious defeat, lose domestic power, destroy our budget, degrade our armed forces, promote global anti-Americanism, and cause this much death, all so Tel Aviv doesn’t have to worry about scud missile attacks from Iraq for the next eight or nine generations? It doesn’t add up.
No. I think that the neo-conservatives were simply delusional and that 9/11 caused a kind of brain fever in Washington DC. I think Hurricane Katrina taught us a valuable lesson about the incompetence level of this administration. They combine a complete lack of moral compass with a simply unimaginable level of incompetence. We saw it in their preperations for and response to 9/11, in the post-invasion planning, and in their response to the deluge in New Orleans.
We cannot be rid of them soon enough. The day this cabal leaves office, the whole world will let out such a sigh of relief that it may blow the Earth straight out of it orbit. Republicans included.
I like Riverbend’s theory – it really is all about appearance with these egotistical fools.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like the “peace with honor” days. I know how difficult is is for me to face when I have made a stupid mistake, and I don’t want anybody to know it, but then I see value in the truth.
I like to think that the USA is going through a difficult adolescence and will grow up soon. (Within my lifetime, please.)
All of us working together will set the ship of state on a proper course, but who knows when?
Riverbend should be on everyone’s front page now, thanks Boo.
I don’t think what is happening now in Iraq bears any relation to what Bush or the neocons intended. I don’t think they could have screwed things up that badly on purpose if they had tried. I think Iraq is Katrina writ large. I think both are what results when delusional ideology and criminal incompetence are joined at the hip.
Have to agree that this is all on purpose. I imagine the following conversation happeneing pre-9/11:
you have an evil mind.
It’s good thing no one from your gene line is allowed to run anything vital in our government or we’d all be in trouble.
Problem is, I read some ‘leaked documents’ to the Christic Institute that were written well pre-9/11 and describe the entire scenario, including the ‘wildman’ president. So this isn’t, unfortunately, entirely from my ass.
My genes aside, you gotta admit that if your goal was to take over the middle east’s resources, that’s a pretty simple one.
I don’t really think so. I think it would be a better plan if you were Russia or China and wanted to replace America as the power broker in the region. Check this out: link.
They combine a complete lack of moral compass with a simply unimaginable level of incompetence.
That sums up the last 20 years or so starting with Nixon and fast forward to Regan, Bush, the republican house and senate and the current crop of idiots. They play fast and loose with no forethought of the ramifications. It’s as if they have the brain of a teenager, who when confronted with their ridiculous actions, look at you and say “I don’t know what happened?”
However, on the other hand is the cold and cruel, calculated evil that lurks just behind the curtain. I’m not talking about just Rove, he’s a minor player compared to those actually pulling the strings.
I think that riverbend is analyzing her own thoughts as the years have gone by. I started to read her way back when she was first noted to write and then she was so happy for America and our adventure in Iraq…well sort of…and she was with a lot of bright and overt reasoning. Over the years, tho, she has become disillusioned with what has been happening and she is there to see it happen. I have been seeing this war through her eyes and it has not been pretty as it has developed. She has at some point become very despondent and saddened by the happenings in her country….the death and murder that has come about by her knight on a white charger coming to free her from things she was not happy about…..It is this death of her friends and I am sure of her family, that have been most devastating for her to think about, let alone write about. Go back and read her whole thing of writings. see her evolve…this is quite revolutionary. This is like receiving letters from a war zone of one of your own and the changing of attitude and mindset. It is remarkable to see the change come about. Her innocence is what is evolving into such a nightmare for her….she is now a full fledged adult of hate and disappointment that it is hard for her to look back sometimes, let alone look forward. What a world of an abyss she must be living in….I, not only worry about her physical safety, I worry about her emotional safety. If only I could speak to her….:o(
I think she was happy to see America come and free her country of SH, but she was not seeing clearly the afterward affect of that removal and she is now so very sad and angry at the same time over her country’s evolution. It does have to be heartbreaking..
I check each day for her postings. When she goes without posting for over 2 months, I get so very worried. I pray for her and her family and their safety.
I can get by in a game of bridge, but was never interested in mastering chess. My beautiful mind was intrigued by this post by SusanUnPC at No Quarter yesterday re Riverbend and Larisa Alexandrovna.
Read it all the way through to Tennyson. Ah, poetry – the essence of communication.
i linked to her in my most recent post. i’m happy she’s blogging again, even as i agree: that was one of her most difficult posts to read to date. and i concur, her thesis makes as much sense as any of our “policies” in iraq.
very soon, the only word people will use to describe things there is “madness.”
Cheney, our guy in the WH with the lauded foreign policy experience seems to listen solely to one govt and that’s Bandar’s Saudi Arabia. So the question begs, not what kind of a state we want to leave Iraq in but what kind of a state Saudi Arabia wants upon our exit. Without our noticing, Cheney may have actually refocused his goals along the way not to deliver the goods of a stable Iraq govt (I’m always suspicious of anything Cheney/Bush declare over and over, it’s usually the opposite they’re working on) but to nurture chaos. As Riverbend points out, how many chances for resolution has Cheney circumvented and chosen instead methods that actually led to more chaos; economic, political and cultural. The strife not only filled the pockets of Halliburton & Blackwater but assured the Saudis that indeed the Iraq govt would not provide any threat to their role as kingpin.
i find it very difficult to believe that the architects of this fiasco actually desire the chaos they’ve created, perhaps, oddly, in the same way that many find it hard to believe that such stupendous folly could be accidental. it’s very difficult to explain the events that have occurred and that are still occurring in one grand unifying theorem.
in a nutshell, i see far too many players and agendas at work to sustain one continuous plan. i think the original plan of those ostensibly in charge (as told by john dizard in salon) had always been only to replace hussein with snake-oil salesman chalabi, whom they believed would have granted america and israel all sorts of liberties that hussein wouldn’t. (and whom also would have put them at iran’s doorstep.) i’ve thus far heard no other plan that would have been more attractive to america and israel than this one — especially any plan that guaranteed perpetual violent turmoil, a plan which could turn in any direction on a dime.
i’ve always looked at the administration’s behavior in the same light as juan cole — who curiously ran the alexandrovna “chess” analysis mentioned upthread. he may have since changed his mind, but he said in february:
i think that ever since chalabi failed to establish his base in iraq, thus foiling their original plan, the adminstration has simply been winging it, hoping that they can play out the clock against first the insurgency, then civil war, and now regional conflagration.
I keep thinking about this guy Negroponte, and how he was said to be responsible for creating chaos in Central America, setting up death squads, and supporting them with cash from the good old democratic US of A.
When he was appointed there were plenty of allusions that made it into print implying that he would bring his expertise in chaos creation into the situation in Iraq. I believe that New York Representative Peter King made such a remark. And I think I read an article by Dahr el Jamail (is that spelling right?) some time back that talked about this subject. So there is a possibility that chaos and killing has been manufactured and introduced as a tool for what purpose I cannot imagine. And that would mean that the US is promoting the fighting and bloodshed that has come to look like civil war. Why don’t we ask Larry Johnson what he thinks about this proposition?
because the piss poor media do not call it what it is – defeat. He can keep talking about the crap he does because the media pick up on the “turning point” talking points. They will not say that the only course open now is withdrawl, and as this is the only option we may as well do it right now.
The fact is nobody wants to admit we have been defeated in Iraq. That is a shock too much for America and especially for our establishment including the media.
We are torturing Iraq just like we torture our “prisoners” there. Why? To break them down into little pieces so we can “rebuild” them in our own image. That’s why there was never a “post-invasion plan” to “reconstruct” the country. That’s why we are building an embassy and bases there that are meant to be permanent.