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.
