Thursday, January 11, 2007

Depends on What "Success" Is

President Bush wants to "succeed" in Iraq. He wants "success" and "victory." He wants to be "victorious." All words he has used often.

I've asked before here at ABN: who is defining these words, as used by the president? Is he? Is Dick Cheney? Is anyone?

We could tell from Secretary of State Rice's testimony today that she too now shares the president's "deer in the headlights" look, certainly feeling she is about to make State look like an irrelevant shambles, just as even Colin Powell managed to do several years ago. So we know Ms. Rice is not calling the shots, and she's not defining the terms. She sounded like a wooden puppet today, with somebody behind the scenes yanking her around. Somebody's roughing her up, and now that the administration's shit is hitting the Congressional fan, she's clearly not up to the job.

There went her chances to run for president.

And we don't have Rummy to kick around any more. Today, when I heard the new Secretary of State Robert Gates warble like a school boy, I actually missed the smarmy Rumster, the squinty, Patton-wannabee Donald (who could kick Trump's ass, speaking of school boys).

Yep, it was a pretty good day for "sea change" in America. Within the last 24 hours, not a single member of the Bush administration sounded at all like he or she even knew what he or she was talking about. No evidence to support the troop build up, no alternatives, no scope, no vision, no diplomacy, no "new course," just blinders on -- and, in case you missed this one, a nighttime raid on an Iranian consulate in Iraq! Now that'll get the big ball rolling. And this is a big ball now, not a snow ball, not a ball of wax, but a ball that's got a Trojan Horse inside, ready to wreck the entire region.

Back in the old glory days of Vietnam, the chain-smoking staffers used to conjure "the domino effect," a vision of one country after another tumbling under the weight of Hanoi's Hell, a tyrannical cancer of communism. First Vietnam, next thing you know it's U.S.

I think Bush kinda likes the domino effect. In fact, it is at the basis of his policy for the Middle East and probably, yes, the Muslim World. Now, under Bush's thumb, the United States is the tyrannical nation promoting and fostering the domino effect. Really Bush has said as much, as he sees the straight-jacketing of Iraq as the key to putting the cuffs on the entire region. Bush is setting up the dominoes, just hoping they'll fall as he hopes they will.

Maybe success means that all the dominoes will fall willy-nilly into chaos so that US Corp. takes backhanded control of the oil fields. That's the only kind of "success" that seems likely to me. The whole "bringing democracy" thing is a ploy, a decoy. The live duck is crude oil. Success? Bush Co. doesn't want to count votes. They want to count barrels, billions of barrels. And trillions of you know what.

To Bush & Co., it's not about peace, it's about profit sharing, though I don't mean sharing with the likes of us, mere citizens. If you haven't received your guilded invitation to their back room victory party yet, you're out of the loop.

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