Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down – Part 2 of 2

In which the children are shooed from the room, and serious men discuss serious matters.

In case it had escaped anyone’s attention, Iraq is lost.

This is not hyperbole.

Nor is it any more or less “defeatist” than watching a tornado reduce a farmhouse to splinters and noting that the prevailing weather is wet and windy.

Because we are -- on cotton-swaddled tippy-toe -- engaged in a veeeery subtle, rear-guard action.

Trying to respectably sidle our stately way in the general direction of the fire-door before we are dribbled to the curb like so many belligerent drunks after closing time is sounded and the lights come up.

Former Marine Corps General Bernard Trainor (ret.) and his writing partner Michael Gordon (previous collaborators on “The General's War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf”) on “Meet the Press” discuss their book, “Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq”.

These are not children ignorantly dancing out “ashes, ashes, all fall down” to cope with the horror they face; these are the sober judgments of men who would clearly rather have been wrong in their analysis.

So to what failings do General Trainor and Michael Gordon ascribe the Iraqi Debacle?

They lay out the key failures thusly:

First, this Administration consistently and completely ignored any inconvenient truths that conflicted with their ideology.

Second, this Administration thought they were playing at Risk or Stratego [my phrase]: If you take the King and the Big City, you have won. This was nonsense. Baghdad wasn’t the “center of gravity.” The whole Sunni Triangle was the pivot on which the war turned.

Third, it turns out that the elements on which all of that gold-pressed latinum, "slam dunk" pre-war intel was built – down to the tasking of forty (four-oh) Cruise missiles to bomb the Hell out of a nonexistent bunker where Saddam was supposed to be, in a town that he had not visited in years – were just so many beer farts and nodules of wishful thinking.

Fourth, from Day One, Bushies sneered at any idea of “nation-building” anywhere. Recall that during the 2000 election, Bush ran on his contempt for any notion of marching into other countries and reformatting their governments. They mocked the Clinton Administration for suggesting that nation-building was ever a national necessity. Hell, they mocked the Clintons for not clocking out at 3:00 every afternoon and working on weekends. Eerily like every other event in Dubya’s lazy, incompetent, privileged life, he simply did not want to do the hard thinking of planning this motherfucker out, and then doing the hard work and heavy lifting of actually following through on making it work.

Too much like homework, I suppose.

And so, wild guess; how do you suppose an Administration that ridiculed the whole notion of “potatoes” did when it came to making potato pancakes?

Fifth, because they didn’t want to do nation building, they conjured up a fantasy where Iraq would be a turn-key operation they could run on the cheap. Maybe even turn a profit. In Saddam Hussein, Daddy Bush willed Dubya an all-purposed Boogie Man that could be trotted out to scare the Mole Rat People into submission whenever the going got tough, and Dubya’s handlers decided to go all-in for the Big Score on that line of credit before the dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center had even settled.

They would knock off the Bad Man, install a friendly government, draw down the troops to less that 30,000, and walk away in a blaze of flashbulbs, “Mission Accomplished” parades…and most importantly, a Teflon-Coated One Party Oligarchy ruling America forever and ever.

Of course this was straight-up delusional thinking – murderously, disastrously delusional thinking – but what are the Republicans but a party founded on just that: stupidity, wishful thinking, a deranged ideology, the ferocious suppression of the Rational Gag Reflex and a giddy eagerness to slime and slander all opposition as weak and traitorous.

Sixth, Donald Fucking Rumsfeld. Our own slick-pated Gordon Gekko gone to seed. Our CEO of Defense, trying to “run” the military like “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap “ran” Sunbeam. Gut the place, fire every other person, and fill in the gaps with the worst kind of drunken promises of the how it’ll all work out if everyone just works smarter and we use a lotta robots.

A conniving pimp full of wild talk, looking for the cheapest possible route to his idea of victory, and to get there he happily embraces a string of reckless, foolish fantasies that have gotten Americans killed and has bled our treasure into the sands of faraway lands.

When asked whether or not the military “pushed back” hard enough, part of the answer was that Rummy’s “management style” is “relentless”. That he will just grind you down to pulp with questions.

How well and intimately we who work for a living know this style of boss.

The one who will grimly slant-drill away until he finds something you don’t know, throw up his hands and say, “Well, see? How can I possibly trust your judgment when you obviously have no idea what you are talking about!” and dismiss your honest and serious objections out-of-hand.

And for those of you s-l-o-w children out there who think this actually sounds like a good way to run a business, remember that anyone can make anyone else look like an idiot if you just cross-examine them to a level of fiddling detail that they can’t possible know and then sneer at them for being uninformed.

Because running an organization – large or small – as the Chief Inquisitor ONLY works when it cuts both ways. When everyone -- even your very bestest buddy -- goes under the microscope. When everyone’s cherished ideas and best intel – and not just those of people that disagree with you -- is scrutinized for Mad Sacred Cow Disease down to the molecular level.

Does anyone in full possession of their faculties still seriously suggest that partisan, pro-Invasion whores like Ahmed Chalabi and “Curveball” ever got the kind of relentless sandblasting from Rummy and extra-special, repeated personal visits from the Vice President to challenge every assumption and check every figure down to nine decimals that the Administration meted out to those who thought that, just maybe, going into Iraq was a bad idea?

Does anyone still even bother to pretend that we wouldn’t be chasing the Mighty Morphin’ Casus Belli three years after we invaded a sovereign nation if the ratty tissue of full-tilt, “Bring ‘em on” pro-Invasion lies had been hit with the same blowtorch that greeted everyone who counseled caution?

And what happens when Relentless Reality finally comes thundering down like the wrath of God to smash Rummy’s, and Dubya’s and Cheney’s ridiculous fantasies to flinders?

C’mon, haven’t you been paying attention?

The Princes of Personal Responsibility will do what they have done every day of this worthless Administration: Blame Everyone Else.

Everyone else under the Sun but themselves and their Cuckoo Bananas dogma.

Throw the staff under the bus and whine that they weren’t better advised: blame the little people they terrorized into silence for not warning them better.

Blame the Dems.

Blame the prostrate Press.

Blame Brownie.

Blame FISA.

Blame the queers.

Blame Hugo Chavez.

Blame condoms.

Blame the "feminazis."

Blame the ACLU.

Blame Liberal Judges.

Blame the “elites”, by which they apparently mean anyone who can read without moving their lips and count to twenty without taking off their socks.

Blame Clinton. Any Clinton.

Blame Hollywood.

Blame taxes.

Blame Darwin. And Newton. And Galileo.

Blame brown people. Anywhere. Everywhere.

Blame everyone who was screaming “Fire!” while the coming conflagration -- that you created by briskly rubbing stupid ideas together -- was containable.

Blame the very people Emperor Dewars slimed and kicked to the curb for daring pointing out that the Princes of Personal Responsibility were charting a course off the edge of the world, using Richard Perle’s febrile wet dreams as their sextant and Ahmed Chalabi’s poo hole as their North Star.

Because in the end it always comes down to the same template, repeated over and over again: A Confederacy of Dunces -- ignorant, arrogant, superstitious people that you probably know better under their brand name of “The Republican Party” – who hate science, fear causality, and shun like a barb-wire catheter the idea that they themselves will ever be objectively measured in the same way and using the same standards by which they demand that everyone else be judged.

And since there is no way around the fact that Reality will eventually get up everyone’s skirt and have its merry way with people that keep insisting that up is down and black, the Mole Rat people can be always predictably relied on to retreat to the one, last fastness that they believe they can defend forever.

Fortress Magical Thinking; that big, imbecile edifice at the corner of Fundy Avenue and Neocon Way.

It is the supreme irony of this Party of swaggering paleo-libertarians that they have become – in actual fact – a grotesque parody of the rogue’s gallery of Evil Collectivist Villains out of every, turgid Ayn Rand novel. The anti-Science, anti-reason marauders who believe if they screw the testicle-clamps on hard enough and use a car-battery massive enough, they can simply torture Truth and Physics into doing whatever monkey-dancing back-flips might amuse them today.

And because the difference between the Heaven’s Gate Cult and the Party of God is not one of kind, but only of degree, when you pledge yourself to the Republican Fraternity in the Dark Age of Dubya, your are eventually required to take sides against Reality itself.

Which is why the GOP Phalanxes out spreading the Good Word today looked so squirmily uncomfortable.

Like they were trying to shit out a 500 lb. block of ground glass and swords.

Because, if you live by Magical Thinking, you die by it also.

When your hold on power depends on breaking every instrument and extinguishing every candle by which your true course can be gauged, you end up – faster that you ever dreamed possible – on that darkling plain full of “ignorant armies” clashing by night.

Swearing by the Deathgod that you are now forced to worship that the world itself turns on the Word of the Dear Leader, and that the only reason his plans have failed is the Evil Countermagic of the Bad Thoughts of his enemies.

America -- for all of our sins and imperfections -- used to be fiercely proud of our heritage as a Child of the Enlightenment. An experiment in putting the absurd and dangerous Dark Age artifacts of the Divine Rights of Kings and the Infallibility of Popes behind us and letting Reason and Compromise remake the world.

This Republic of Reason has always been the promise of America. And it is precisely this foundational vision of our purpose and future the Republican Party now profoundly rejects and seeks to replace with an Empire of Mysticism, Ignorance and Fear.

Proving, yet again, that in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both.