Reply #15: Fear of an outburst [View All]

of logical competence and patriotic blindness lead them to follow the lead of untrustworthy leaders because some mythical definition of those merely holding certain offices gives them some infallible trustworthiness. Members of the club with known records for mendacity and corruption and fake intel coerced from bureaucratic underlings were on one side. On the other the guns of the corporate media were lined up like North Korean artillery against the Dems. More unbelievable than opportunism and fear is the credulity of people "up there" regarding any number of transparent crimes and crises they fail to rate or detect.

The last myth is that with better provisioned and more numerous troops Iraq could have been secured away from becoming the nightmare it is. Many still believe that without realizing the Bush and neocon determinism that doom ANY plans whatsoever for a secure and independent, undivided Iraq. In several key ways, even with the military given a better hand, the whole situation would have been undercut and eventual chaos come to pass. profiteering, imperialism, deliberate setting of group against group, removal of Iraqis from control over their own affairs or "reconstruction", permanent military bases, and tons of corruption and demons in details in the public civilian sector alone.

I'll tell you what a more competent initial war would have meant. A slower fuse in Iraq and an immediate hubristic mess in Iran/Syria. And this is what where the suppositions and hopes of Dems favoring an older hawkish ME policy would have ended up in any case in Bush's hands especially, and maybe any brighter substitute. Meanwhile more foreign nations getting bribed or coerced by the oil looting would be dragged into a real WWIII scenario. Bush's failure and the Dems submitting initially to the failed experiment has made the people of Iraq take the full brunt of the war for this century's fate. Blasting our way through the 21st Century is longer a real option even if some myth of American intervention is still residing in what ifs and simple re-calculations.

In retrospect Germany could have won both world wars handily. But that is to sell the determinism of human incompetence tragically short. Given more time and chances and the same stupidity, same actors, the same results must eventually occur- worse or longer off.