Trapeze Swingers and Pseudo-Certainty
June 23rd, 2006When it came to negotiating with Iran three years ago, from a position of strength, the Administration decided that Iran was collapsing and they would wait for it rather than discuss with the Mullahs. When it came to negotiating over four years ago with the North Koreans, the Bush Administration decided that the North Korean regime was bound to collapse and so it avoided talks with Kim Jung Il. In neither case was there a collapse, and with both countries we wound up negotiating years later from a lower perch.
When it came to deciding how much bad news in Iraq was too much, I decided to cling to the ever-fewer positives that I could find and blind myself because I believed in the cause. And I do believe in the cause, by all means. If I had the choice between invading Iraq and not invading it, yet again, with all things the same as they were in 2003, I’d do it, but it’s everything thereafter that was bumbled. Since the War began, I have waited for competence from the Administration, and I’ve waited for results, and from that I have learned that it is one thing to wait for the sun to rise before you go out for a morning jog.
It’s another to wait for Haley’s Comet before you begin to exercise. I am tired of waiting for that comet.
If yesterday’s article weren’t enough to cause me bitter feelings over the way the War has been handled, over the fact that we have failed the Iraqi people by not planning properly or acting effectively, this happened today.
The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew Friday after insurgents set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and fired on U.S. and Iraqi troops outside the heavily fortified Green Zone. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered everyone off the streets of the capital from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m. Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed throughout the morning with attackers carrying rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles in busy Haifa Street, which runs into the Green Zone, site of the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government.
Four Iraqi soldiers and three policemen were wounded, police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said. The area was sealed and Iraqi and U.S. forces conducted house-to-house searches. The fighting was unusual in its scope and intensity. There have, however, routinely been clashes along Haifa Street, making it so dangerous that a sign at one Green Zone exit checkpoint warns drivers against using it.
You mean to tell me that, after all these years, we still have insurgents that are capable of setting up road blocks by our checkpoints and attacking us? We have some serious problems, and I’m growing major qualms with this War — with this Administration, rather, this Administration that takes to deceiving like Antonin Scalia to a duckhunt. I feel like I have been living as a trapeze swinger, going from swing to swing in mid-air with little connecting me to the swing but my outstretched, reaching arms and the hope that I’ll be able to reach. Iraq is a mess, and while I haven’t given up, I am no longer willing to swing for the White House on this or anything else where the benefit of the doubt has to be given. Bush has, from the NSA to Iraq, made a fool of me whenever I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt. Never again.
In the news lately is this, the arrest of men who were plotting to blow up a series of buildings, starting with my beloved Sears Tower downtown. The plot that was disrupted was in its minor stages, apparently, but I’m happy to see it whenever a terrorist is arrested. This morning, I received an email telling me that this plot’s undoing is evidence that the aggressive response by Bush to 9/11 is working. I say, simply, that we have defeated terrorist plots, in their beginning stages and toward the end of their planning cycles in the past without using a massive and illegal wiretapping program, too. See the milennium plots for proof: the airlines-being-blown-over-the-Pacific-ocean-plot, for more details, but don’t let anyone suggest something that has no backing by any of the known facts.
Finally, I stumbled across Helen Thomas’ latest article, and it’s a piece lecturing Democrats about how we need a “new script.” I’m sorry, Helen, but the press that you are a part of needs a new script. Thomas has to either become a journalist, period, and attend press briefings and ask questions — pointed ones are fine, to be sure — or start writing editorials solely. She can’t have it both ways, and when she tries to she’s contributing to the breakdown in American society of journalism. People may say that it’s money, ultimately, but really, it’s the mixing of opinion and fact. The mixing of opinion and fact in our news programs, on our front pages — this is leading to the phenomenom of “pseudo certainty” in which every thinks they know what they’re talking about but nobody does because the news is being delivered in slants.