What we are becoming parlay 88I rediscovered that I like reading.
What we are becoming parlay 88
I rediscovered that I like reading. Here are some parlay 88 of the books I've read in the last few weeks.
The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (I went to high school with the author of this one)Beyond Fear (tangentially related)
I also watched the movies Uncovered: The War in Iraq and Outfoxed.
I know there's no book in there called "Iraq: Everything's Swell" so perhaps I'm not "fair and balanced" like a certain network, or perhaps such books are in short supply. The horrification factor throughout is hard to overstate. ¿What is the saying? If you're not consumed by rage, you're not paying attention?
One of the recurrent themes in all these books is that qualifications for any particular job in iraq have little relevance. The primary and only requirement is loyalty to the cause. That doesn't mean being a republican donor or campaigner, though those are good ways to get in: it means never having suggested that the ambition to reshape the middle east in our image might have been overly ambitious or misguided. The administration has built a yes-man bubble around themselves that is antithetical to any kind of sensible government.
When you see how far these guys go to avoid hearing or believing inconvenient facts, and realize that much of the incompetence demonstrated in iraq (as well as the decision to go to war in the first place) has been a direct result of that, it puts the cheney command to have all televisions pre-tuned to fox news in a truly sinister light. The people parlay 88 prosecuting this war are not living in the same world as you and I. They reside in a fantasy bubble where they can do what they want and they'll get the result they want. The standard for belief is not whether something is true, it is whether they want it to be true. As to where people refine that sort of "thinking", draw your own conclusions from the book I read yesterday.
Meanwhile the war we were told would practically pay for itself has cost 320 billion with some estimates of the final cost reaching into multiple trillions. Trillions! That shouldn't even be a real word.
We botched iraq for good in the first couple days. Despite having all the time in the world to prepare, the administration gave very little thought to post-war iraq. It was all about the invasion to them. The looting - a 100% predictable and avoidable response - devastated the country to a degree I never heard about in american media, while we stood by and did exactly nothing. People stole everything that wasn't nailed down and burned the rest. Suddenly we were responsible for every service in the country with no plan, no infrastructure, no understanding of its people, no expertise, and total lawlessness already reigning. And yet we continued to entertain the neocon fantasy that we could just decree "you are now a capitalist democracy: go forth and prosper!" and it would happen by magic.
I hear a lot of critiquing the invasion of iraq, and i agree with A LOT of the points, however, ¿what is the better solution?
Doing absolutely nothing would have been a MUCH MUCH better "solution" with respect to terrorism. I can't believe anyone who is following the situation in iraq could fail to see this. Try to avoid implying that either there is a magic solution that eliminates terrorism, or we had to invade iraq. This is known as "the fallacy of the excluded middle" and it is particularly egregious here when one pole of the false dilemma involves a war that was waged entirely on manufactured pretenses.
One of the great non-intuitive truths of life that you can't eliminate poverty by giving people money. (I'm going to go out on a limb and assume people realize this.) In a similar perhaps non-intuitive vein, you can't eliminate terrorism by shooting people. You can't even reduce it. I know the republicans like to paint anyone who takes this position as a pussy. It's a real intellectual tactic, yessir. How about we try using our fucking heads just for one day. Everything the neocons thought they could accomplish in iraq is a fantasy. Security is a prerequisite for every other goal that we had. Three years, thousands of lives, and three hundred billion dollars later, iraq is more dangerous than it has ever been.
There is a persistent delusion that more money and time will allow us to "prevail" in iraq, whatever that means. This is PURE FANTASY. The relatively widespread belief of this fantasy seems to stem from the deeply mistaken idea that this is like a dam building project: just keep pouring the concrete and eventually you'll have a dam. In other words, you have to think we're making forward progress to believe this. Wake up! We have ALREADY LOST, whether we leave now or five years from now. Our adventure in iraq is more like a hole digging project than a dam building one.
I defy you to read any of these books (or any of numerous others, except any written by people who live in the fantasy bubble) and come out with the opinion that we can "win" in this contest. Not only is the game rigged, but our leaders couldn't win an ass-kicking contest against a one-legged man. Every soldier who dies now dies for the glory of the bush administration's inability to admit any error.
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