1 Boring Old Man

There’s an odd paradox in our foreign policy. We all know something is wrong, but it’s hard to exactly say what the fallacy is. Before the War in Iraq, our government paid almost no attention to the fact that such a war would destabilize Iraq and the Middle East. Now, we’re told that pulling out of Iraq will destabilize Iraq and the Middle East. What’s being pitched is that we [the invaders] are the force of stability in Iraq. And many believe that our problem is that we didn’t send enough troops – that if our force were stronger, we could supress the sectarian violence. Let me say it again. Saddam Hussein was a despot who used force to control his people, so we deposed him with Operation Iraqi Freedom. Now we must use force to control the Iraqi, and they are out of control because we didn’t use enough force. We should use more force. Should we rename it Operation Iraqi Supression?

Here’s my attempt to understand it. Not make our policy make sense, but to understand what’s wrong with it. The Bush Doctrine is based on a simple idea – being a tough guy – something like "the best defense is a good offense." We’ll be the superpower and blast anyone that messes with us. To quote Mr. Bush from Hubris [referring to Saddam Hussein], "I’m going to kick his mother-fucking ass all over the Middle East." Since it’s hard to get people [and Congress] behind this policy stated in that form, we have to come up with something that sounds better. There are two candidates: He’s a danger to us. He’s a despot and his people need to be liberated from his control. Neither of these things really matter to us, but they sound a lot more … well, they just sound better. The danger part is a little shaky, so it would help to connect him to some real danger like al Qaeda. So, the lofty reason that we’re going to war with him is that he has Weapons of Mass Destruction [ergo, a danger] AND his people need to be free from his tyranny AND he is behind [or has ties with] the Islamic Terrorists who blew up the Twin Trade Towers. These latter reasons cover [and sanitize] our primary policy, "I’m going to kick his mother-fucking ass all over the Middle East." Now, we’ve "kicked his mother-fucking ass all over the Middle East," we are left with making good on the cover, a cover that neither mattered nor was even true.

So Cheney wasn’t being defensive when he said, “if we had it to do over again, we’d do exactly the same thing.” What he was talking about was kicking "his mother-fucking ass all over the Middle East." And when they talk about "the lesson of 911," what they think is that 911 happened because we weren’t tough enough in the past. The right thing to do, in this line of thinking, is to kick everybody’s "mother-fucking ass all over the Middle East." It’s really Operation Kick Their Mother-fucking Asses.

Oh, by the way, the part we keep raving about, that 911 was caused by al Qaeda and that Iraq is something else entirely. Under the Kick Their Mother-fucking Asses policy, that doesn’t really matter. We’d also kick Osama’s "motherfucking ass" if we could find him. And we’d kick Iran’s "motherfucking ass" too if all those Liberals would get out of the way. The "his" in "I’m going to kick his mother-fucking ass all over the Middle East" is pretty generic. Iraq was just the easiest "his mother-fucking ass" to kick…

How’d I do?