Why Cassandra

Lost her damned mind.

From Wikipedia.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra (Greek: Κασσάνδρα "she who entangles men") (also known as Alexandra) was a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy whose beauty caused Apollo to grant her the gift of prophecy. However, when she did not return his love, Apollo placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions.

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When Cassandra foresees the destruction of Troy (she warns the Trojans about the Trojan Horse, the death of Agamemnon, and her own demise), she is unable to do anything to forestall these events. Her family believes she is mad, and, according to some versions, kept her locked up because of this. From her appearances in various plays, it seems that the incarceration drove her truly mad, at least by the time of Troy's destruction

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Steve Gilliard has this up. It is from his own analysis of what might well be coming in Iraq.

In April, 2003.

I wrote this in 2003. Long before anyone else saw this outcome on the horizon.


How Iraq could devolve into Civil War

Iraq is clearly suffering a period of disorder, the question is will it shift into civil war?

I am not predicitng a civil war. What I am saying is that there will be signs of a country slipping into civil war which should be clear. I don't know what will happen. Maybe the exiles and the US can build peace. I certainly hope so, because the alternative could be a catastrophy for both Americans and Iraqis.

* A lack of respect for civil institutions

The looting of hospitals is a bad sign. Taking things from a hospital, which is designed to help people, is not only mere greed. It is the suggestion that there is no respect for civil authority. Most people will loot a store or a government office, but a hospital? That's more than just greed. It means the people doing the robbing are either criminals looking to add to their loot, crazed teenagers, or people looking to create dependency on another source of power. Which is scary beyond belief.

The US military's easy going attitude towards the looting was amazing and amazingly self-destructive. It sends a message that they will not oppose groups of Iraqis breaking the law. This will not be seen as tolerance, but weakness.

* Rape and home robberies

There are reports of both according to the BBC in Basra and I can expect the same in Baghdad. That's the trigger to building home arsenals and then developing local militias. People will protect their families from harm. And this is where charsimatic leadership starts. The former Iran-Iraq War vet who beats a looter with his bare hands then becomes the local hero, starts gathering men around, and acquires a base of power.

Sound familiar? That's how the Taliban started in Afghanistan. The local warlords were pulling out teenagers and raping them and robbing the truck drivers. The locals, not into seeing their boys raped, formed a band of guerrillas. The rest, as they say, is history.

* The US Authority is slow to get off the ground

Iraq had a state-run economy. Most Iraqis depended on the state for food and work. Without a viable state, they will be able to get neither. That means illness and starvation. Starving, ill people will look to leadership from any quarter. The only way to prevent this is the timely delivery of security and food, water and healthcare.

*Factionalism starts to grow

We already have the indications of factionalism. The murder of an exile Shia cleric is a hint that the locals are not eager for their brethern to return home and start running things. Many of these exiles have been gone for decades. But the thing which could be worrysome is when the exiles start to gather local gunmen.

What could be a real problem is when the INC meets and Ahmed Chalebi starts to take a major role. The SCIRI, the largest and best armed of the exile groups, is clearly not interested in any role in an American-led occupation government. Its leader, Ayatollah Hakim Al-Bakir, has told anyone who asks that he would resist a US occupation. The murder of two Shia clerics, while not tied to him, could be a hint of what is to come.

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* Anti-Americanism coaleses into a coherent movement

It's one thing to have individuals come up to Marines saying go home. It's another to have a crowd marching saying that. Once you start to have groups come together over a central theme-opposing American power-you will be creating the circumstances for various groups to start funding these efforts. The Arab world is desperately unhappy about the US invasion. It would take very little for money to flow from one bank account to another.

The first signs of real trouble and things could get ugly quickly from here is if Shia clerics, remember Shias are 60 percent of the country, declare that their people must oppose the US. Once that moral and religious grounding is established, opposition will explode because it will be justified to the majority of people.
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* The factionalism turns to violence

It will start small. Assassinations, maybe a shoot out or two in a distant province away from direct US control. Maybe a US official or an exile. Then the killings move to mob-style violence, car bombs, gunfights, kidnappings, murders. As the pace of the killings grow, you start to see organized formations. Maybe 1000 men, maybe 1500. They start to use heavier weapons, rockets, mortars, machine guns in their internecine battles. Neighborhoods, then towns, start to fall into disorder. Local militas now control the area. …

* There are moves to consolidate power

The groups grow, they bump up against each other, they keep killing. And then they choose sides. A group of Shia decide to openly challenge the occupation government and declare their own rule, the Kurdish parties start in against each other, the INC collapses and the wild card, Saddam supporters decide to throw their lot in with the Shia and reveal where their weapons are. The Army splits along ethnic lines and you have the Sunni divisions and Republican Guard against the Shia units and the generals decide to join one group or the other.
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Steve Gilliard

When I was a kid, there was this episode of the Night Gallery called “The Boy who Predicted Earthquakes”.

It featured a young Clint Howard (but then, didn’t every oddball show?) as a teevee psychic who

“…prattles about his day in school or books he's reading, adding in the course of things a prediction or two. The station manager is up against the networks, fires the executive, wipes the tape, but the missing girl is found with injuries as predicted, an earthquake happens with damage and fatalities, the boy is signed to a 25-year contract.”

(Thanks IMDb)

He could see imperfectly -- only one day or so into the future and only foresee the outcome of events that he had read something about -- and became quite a phenomenon, predicting ballgames and tornadoes and the locations of lost puppies and such.

This continues for a year and a half and then one day he refuses to go on.

His manager tells him that this’ll freak out his audience, so he does his show as usual and, at the end of his broadcast and out of the blue, he predicted that the next day all human problems would be resolved, all conflicts would end, and we would all live together in harmony.

Which, needless to say, catches everyone by surprise.

The studio was flooded with calls from everyone you can think of, wanting to know exactly what the hell the kid was talking about.

And because he’s just a little boy he finally confides to his manager what’s really going to happen.

That tomorrow the Sun would become something called a “nova”; something he’d read about in science class.

But he didn’t want to tell the people that because then they’d be afraid.

Anyone who thinks being right about bad things happening -- thinks this is some fucking game -- is an idiot. Anyone who thinks there’s some kind of pleasure in seeing disaster coming and be unable to stop it no matter how hard you try is a fool.

Ask any mother of an out-of-control teenager. Ask any climate scientist. Ask Al Gore.

I can think of no nightmare worse than watching your country drive off, stone drunk on pig ignorance and corn liquor patriotism, in the back of a panel truck driven by madmen at full-speed towards the edge of the Abyss.

And I can think of no salt-in-the-wounds sting deeper than those people who are driving us all off the cliff screaming that you hate your country -- that you are a traitor -- for begging them to stop or slow down or change course.

Mr. Gilliard was asking all the right questions and connecting all the right dots in the Spring 2003. And if there were anyone left awake at the State Department they’d be dispatching a limo to his place right this minute to bring him in and ask for his help.

A couple of years later as things were clearly falling apart, Tom Friedman was making an even more incandescent ass of himself than usual ass on the pages of the NYT, scolding us bad Liberals because:

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Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.”

I replied, in part, as follows:

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So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?

Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with two choices too terrible to contemplate -- leap into oblivion or be roasted alive.

And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this poor bastard might have had became irrelevant. Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

That, you despicable little stooge, is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.

On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn't act right now we were fucked.

Mushroom-cloud fucked.

And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the Peace would be hard.

He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The gains would be high. Virtually painless.

But MOST of all, that the fire was nipping at our heels. It was so urgent, so imperative. that if we didn’t want to see our children perish, we had to jump right now.

So we did.

Convinced by Bush that it was the only option left to us -–and that he had planned carefully for the consequences -- we leaped out of window and into the sky.

We jumped, because we were told we had to.

And in jumping, we committed our troops, our nation and our good name to the brutal calculus of war; to factors beyond our control, and now we are plunging down and down and down into tragedy.

And as we fall we find that the building was not on fire at all.

That the people that pushed us into space had lied to us.

That the parachute of carefully planning that they were supposed to have prepared to save us from ruin had been packed with nothing but empty slogans and ideology-drunk fantasies.

Now we are falling, out of control.

And pointing out that we are falling because of the lies and delusions of the Administration has nothing to do with whether or not I "want the Bush team to succeed” you contemptible little weed. We are watching the country we passionately love plummet into darkness along the exact trajectory we warned you about, and you think that there is any joy in being right?

Any pleasure in seeing your beloved wasted and playing in traffic?

Sorry, Friedman, but no.

Now whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs we might have had have become irrelevant. Flapping our arms doesn’t matter. Prayer doesn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations are all that matter.

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For myself, there was never any pleasure in watching the Bush Administration make every single fuckup it was possible to make in Iraq like they were going down a God damned checklist.

No pleasure in watching every one of my country’s most precious assets -- our blood, our treasure, our good name, our respect for the rule of law, our repudiation of torture -- going up in smoke at the hands the Neocons, the Theocons, the Fuck-Everyone-But-Meocons and the squealing porcine masses of the Republican Base.

But now that the catastrophic scale of their failure is clear for all to see, the time has come to say that people like Gilliard must have a much larger voice in our public conversations.

And it's also time to to say that only public forums the liars and the lunatics and the Geopolitically Godstruck who cynically packaged and sold the Iraqi Debacle to the American people deserve any longer are the stocks, the pillory and The Hague.