roachboy

this sad fact of the matter is that the bush administration has created for itself and for the u.s. more generally a strategic debacle of such amazing proportions in iraq as to almost boggle the mind.

there are no good options.

worse, it seems that the administration continues to see itself as boxed in by its own manly man rhetoric of resoluteness in a way that is a cross purposes with the military itself, at cross purposes with the strategic situation in the ground (so far as you can make it out from within the smokefilled room that is infotainment about what is happening in iraq) and at cross purposes with the recommendations of the baker commission (whose function it appears to be, as someone else said here before, to state the obvious)....

ramping up the number of troops--the surge as they call it--would seem to me a futile move in a futile campaign of face-saving. the question of who takes the politcal hit for it seems to me premature on the one hand and at best secondary on the other--what is the point of speculating about the damage to come from a strategic shift the character of which is not yet evident at all?

if the administration decides to pursue its manly "surge"--and when as a result the new and improved version of the iraq debacle reaches a point where the draft is required----the domestic political situation will no doubt explode: perhaps the right hopes in some twisted way for such an explosion as it will give renewed traction, in its fantasy world, for its version of identity politics.

or perhaps the administration is banking on the magnitude of the mess that it has made for itself overwhelming the tedious dynamics of politics-as-assignment-of-blame.

but what i would expect is happening--speculatively--is that the administration is scrambling for a tactical shift that it can present congress as something of a fait accompli when it enters its next session. in which case, the administration is more concerned about the illusion of momentum (as if the war in iraq was a football game and the commentators were watching an offensive drive take shape and begin speculating about a shift in the flow of the game) in domestic political terms than it is about doing anything coherent about or in iraq.


but none of this seems to me coherent.

it looks like we who watch are confronted with a spectacle of complete incoherence coupled with a media dynamic of necessary support for whomever is in power that prevents the acknowledgement of incoherence.
so it repeats.

i have no idea what the outcome of all this will be, but i cannot see anything good coming of it.

ho ho ho.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite