The Spawn Of The Iraq War

I absolutely hate posting about the Middle East, mainly because there are many other people more knowledgeable on this topic than I am and also because it is nothing anymore but a total slam dance, so to speak, with Syria and Iran pulling the strings in Lebanon as Hezbollah and Israel blast each other to pieces.

To come up to speed a bit on this, I read this fine column from Trudy Rubin in the Inquirer yesterday, who as far as I'm concerned is one of the few journalists out there who knows what's going on with all of this, primarily because she's actually traveled to these countries and reported from the locations that are currently engulfed in violence.

Since the leaders of the industrialized nations must step forward and find some way to mediate this mess, this means of course that Tony Blair had to spring into action right away and try to get Putin and Hu of China to help also while Dubya is basking in the imaginary glow of attention he received for making a joke about a pig (and profanity into an open microphone is such a sign of mature, adult leadership, isn't it?).

(Yes, I know a lot of this was last week's news. Please bear with me - I'm trying to catch up.)

So I guess that means we can toss the "roadmap to Middle East peace" huh?

And while warnings went out to President Stupid Head and the ruling cabal about the Iraq War generating regional violence (warning which were dutifully ignored by the Repugs, of course), I think we know have seen those warnings come to hideous fruition.

Yes, the G-8 leaders have to do what heads of state do best at times like this, and that is generate photo ops while issuing declarations that will in all likelihood be ignored by the combatants until they decide to stop blowing the crap out of each other and sit down and talk for a little while. And I think Rubin made an excellent point by stating that this is Iran's way of showing that they ultimately are the new power in that area of the world that must be reckoned with, though they are of course overplaying their hand (and if you read Rubin's column, maybe you'll have the same reaction I did about her matter-of-fact statement that the Iraq War helped consolidate Iran's power - it would have been nice if the architects of this horrible fiasco had cared about the result or had some clue before the first shot was fired, wouldn't it?).

One more thing: I have a question for American Jews and Israelis who supported Dubya and the Iraq War.

Why didn't you know this would happen?

Why didn't you know an American incursion into Iraq would enflame U.S.-Israel-Arab tensions more than before, to the benefit of borderline cases like AhMADinejad and other terrorists?

Did you honestly believe that trying to shove anything approximating Democracy down the throats of the Sunnis and Shiites would yield any other result but this?

Why didn't you realize that Saddam Hussein - mean, rotten, nasty guy that he was - was A BUFFER against OUR REAL ENEMY? Are you going to realize that Clinton played this right when he was president by sending over some F-16s for an air strike every now and then to keep Hussein in line, and that that was all that was needed?

So you got played by the evangelicals and the "moral values" crowd on all of this also, huh? You thought Dubya was going to build "a shining city on a hill" in Baghdad and democracy would flourish from there to Tel Aviv?

God, how pathetic.

And I wouldn't care if it weren't for the fact that our people in Iraq (and why the hell are they STILL THERE ANYWAY??!!) will endure more hardship and brutality as a result of the Israeli attacks on Shiites, who we need to help maintain anything that might one day approximate stability in Iraq (all of this has been pointed out by Rubin, I know).

If Dubya really wanted to do us a favor, he'd exchange places with the pig the next time that meal is served. A dead, cooked barnyard animal may possibly bring us approximately the same degree of "leadership" that we currently have on this and other urgent matters.

Update 7/19: Robert Scheer nails it again.