Protracted War

The free ride for the Left in opposing George W. Bush may be over. Things are going to get more complicated and ambiguous.

Speaking as someone who blogged against the War on Terror since 2002, it was an easy target for anybody with a computer, access to the Internet, and common sense.

The Bush administration clearly jumped the shark with the over-the-top announcement by satellite link from Moscow of Jose Padilla’s arrest. After the summer of 2002, only true believers and the willfully blind could ignore the carnival of deceit, hypocrisy, and arrogant ambition that drove the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Bush ran the War on Terror like an idiot and it made it easy for the rest of us to look smart.

There are, of course, encouraging signs that there are elements in the Bush administration who are content to continue with the old stupidity. The “Iranian IED” fiasco, neatly debunked by Alexander Cockburn, is an example.  

Like A Rat Running for Daylight

There is, I think, a misconception about the Bush administration’s military strategy for the Middle East.

There is no military strategy.

There is only a political strategy.

The political strategy is to keep the pot boiling in the Middle East so that George Bush and Dick Cheney can continue to claim the privileges and protections of a wartime presidency.

Because peace, truth, and time are the Bush administration's deadliest enemies.

As soon as we opt for disengagement instead of victory and the Iraq war is defined as a failure, the Bush administration is stripped of the “war presidency” status that allows it to shield all its actions from public scrutiny by claiming the needs of urgency, security, and secrecy.  

Have You Got What It Takes to Torture?

Now that the Iraq adventure is officially a fiasco, the liberal hawks are crawling out of the woodwork and defend their early support for what is now irrevocably and safely Bush’s cock-up.

Max Sawicky and Kevin Drum are pushing the argument disapprovingly known as the incompetence dodge: that the Iraq war was a failure of execution and integrity by the Bush administration, not necessarily a repudiation of the whole “good war” theory of scientific pre-emption and humanitarian intervention.

That’s deluded and disturbing.

I’m one of those reflexively anti-war types going back to 2002, as documented by my archive.

I’m not a peacenik, because I’m too cynical about human weakness to believe that peace is going to solve the world’s problems.

But I am anti-war.