Did you ever have a dream, a really bad nightmare, in which you do something very bad that's completely undoable? Someone is killed as a result of your inattention or malfeasance, and it can't be undone, or something similar?
So often in real life, the mistakes we make, or the misdeeds we do, or the missteps we take can all be corrected or excused or covered over. We work doubleplus harder and get the job done despite our previous sloppiness or lack of attention, or we divert attention elsewhere and breathe a sigh of relief that we got away with it (whatever "it" was). But in the bad dream, what we do has terrible consequences of awesome finality, and it can't be undone or whitewashed away.
I usually wake up from those kinds of dreams with a start, and have trouble going back to sleep afterwards. (Thank goodness they don't happen too often.)
I'm beginning to feel about Iraq a bit of the sense of panic that those dream bring about in me.
What I'd really like to say is that we should walk away, just pull out and get out and leave the whole entire godforsaken mess behind. I know a lot of my friends, liberals all, feel that way, but I can't bring myself to agree with them. I think that this attitude is a bit of a holdover from Vietnam, where we really should have walked away a lot earlier than we did -- but Iraq is not Vietnam, because the civil conflict in Vietnam existed before we showed up, and even before the French showed up, but the situation in Iraq is almost entirely of our own making. True, the nature of the state of Iraq, an entirely artificial construct created by the Brits after World War I is a large part of the problem, but there's no denying that by removing Saddam from the equation, and by not being prepared for the entirely foreseeable (and well foreseen by many people!) consequences, we engender the chaos that now prevails, so our responsibility for the terrible situation in Iraq is almost total, in a way that our responsibility for Viernam was not.
I'm not talking about the "white man's burden," it more along the lines of "you broke it, you bought it" -- which may be entirely simplistic as a statement of foreign policy, but does succinctly express the moral dilemma involved.
So I resist the temptation to cut and run, and think that we have to stay at least to the point where things are somewhat stabilized, before we turn things over to some kind of international authority which can undertake a true transition to an Iraqi authority -- but I'm brought up short by the continuing realization that Bush and company simple have no idea what they're doing in Iraq, and no capability for achieving a stable situation there. (It was Bush's total incompetence, more than anything else, which ultimately turned me against the possibility that an invasion of Iraq might be justified on moral, ethical, humanitarian and foreign policy grounds, because whatever the potential justifications for it -- many of which turned out not to be true in any case -- it was abundantly clear that the Bush administration was going to blow the whole thing big time --not the invasion so much as the occupation and reconstruction -- which is exactly what has happened so far.)
How can I justify staying, when things are only going to get worse under the continuing control of Bush & Co.? But how can I justify leaving, when we created the chaos that is now Iraq and have a moral responsibility to fix things, at least as far as they can be fixed.
So that's why Iraq begins to remind me of that nightmare, as a thing that once done, can be undone, and can't, apparently, be covered up or ignored or stepped away from or hidden or excused or misdirected away from. We're damned if we do and damned if we don't, and I'm damned if I can figure out what the right solution is. We've managed to take a country suffering under the humiliating tyranny of a vicious dictator, a true sow's ear of a situation, and turn it into another sow's ear, only of a kind even more difficult to morph into a silk purse, or a purse of any kind. We've been successful in creating a problem apparently as intractable as the Israeli/Palestinian knot, equally as resistant to solution from either side of the equation.
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
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recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
All e-mail received is subject to being published on unfutz without identifying names or addresses.
Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
