The audacity of pointlessness

Calamity John rides on, on his trusty ploughhorse (anyone remember the ploughhorse), tilting at imaginary windmills of his own making. Is anyone going to believe that Barack Obama wanted to “lose” the “war” in Iraq just so he could become President? This is a claim so pointless as to be absurd. Is anyone going to believe that Calamity John, seeing that we were “losing” in Iraq, fashioned and championed the “surge” that has now led us to a glorious “victory?” Is anyone going to believe that Calamity John “knows how to win wars?” Just what wars has he won? Korea? Vietnam? World War II? Maybe World War I? Perhaps Grenada, we had a great victory there. He keeps insisting that Obama would have surrendered in Iraq. What in the world is he talking about? His persistent insistence that we have “won” in Iraq is so far-fetched he might as well be talking about his imaginary giraffe playmate. The very idea of “winning” or “losing” in Iraq is absurd. He seems unable to give us a definition of victory, so it is not clear what we might have won. There is no successful unity government in Iraq. The Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds are still bickering over who will get what, when, and how. It is obvious that all three groups are just biding their time until we withdraw. The Sunnis will want to restore themselves to power, the Kurds will want autonomy if not independence, and al-Sadr is just waiting to become the next strong man of Iraq. So if we have won, why don’t we leave? According to Calamity John and his backers we can’t leave because the results would be disastrous. So if we can’t leave how is it we have achieved a victory? We thought we had installed a suitable puppet government under al-Maliki but he is proving to be too independent and insists we should leave. But leave all that oil to the Iraqis? Impossible. If it is hard to determine what imaginary victory we might have won, it is not difficult to see what we have lost. First, we have lost our moral compass. We pre-emptively attacked a sovereign nation in an unprecedented manner that was not a threat to us, a major war crime. We thereby have also lost the respect of the rest of the civilized world. We have lost our position as the “beacon on the hill” that others looked up to, and have become a rogue nation feared by all thinking and fair-minded people. We have lost our aura of invincibility and demonstrated that we cannot defeat any people who simply refuse to comply with our demands (guerilla warfare is not our forte). We have lost our claim to being an honest broker in world affairs, with our one-sided and uncritical support of Israel, the number one problem in the Middle East. We have lost our reputation of being a nation of laws, both domestic and international. In world affairs we are now a pariah. And not least, we have lost a trillion or more dollars of taxpayer money that could have been used for our critical domestic problems here at home. So Calamity John insisting we have won a victory is as pointless as baying at the moon. If there is such a thing as winning or losing in war, we have clearly lost. We have lost and the loss cannot be redeemed no matter what may now happen in Iraq.

It is not difficult to fathom the immense success of Barack Obama, both here at home and abroad. It’s not clear how much is Obama and how much is anti-Bush/Cheney. It is clear the world is sick to death of Bush/Cheney and is just waiting for them to lose the next election. And they are not interested in having a continuation of these horrible nightmare years of the budding 21st century.. They want Bush/Cheney gone. I suspect even if it were Smoky-the-Bear running, the feelings would be much the same. I fear that the expectations for Obama are so great they may be beyond the power of any mortal man. Calamity John can flail away pointlessly all he wants, I believe the writing is on the wall. Let’s get it over with and try to get on with some form of the more “normal” existence we enjoyed in the past. We have never been without problems, but problems doesn’t even begin to describe what we have now. Bush/Cheney will be cursed from now until eternity.

LKBIQ:
In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.
Edward P. Tryon