The Poet's Eye-(first draft) Catastrophic Success

[Lightning Rod]

My lovely partner and I were eating shrimp cocktail in a small bistro outside of DC when Shock & Awe popped up on the screen above the bar. The US had begun its invasion of Iraq. We watched on CNN as the rockets red glare lit up the night sky over Baghdad.

During the next few days I watched what the president so tenderly terms as "catastrophic success." I saw the Iraqi forces melting away before the mighty juggernaut of our armies and airpower.

I'm no military expert, but it didn't take me long to postulate what would happen. The Iraqis, in the face of irresistible force, simply took discretion as the better part of valor and faded into the countryside in order to live to fight another day. Then the coalition forces made the colossal blunder of disbanding the remnants of the Iraqi Army thereby adding another wave of potential guerrillas to the mix.

Just this week it came to light that both the Bush and the Blair governments were provided with "intelligence" that predicted the very scenario that I, sitting in a bar outside DC, could surmise from sketchy news reports. Any idiot could see what was going on. The Iraqis were avoiding a head-on confrontation with an overwhelming opponent in favor of the guerilla tactic of disappearing into the general population and then harassing the invader day by day at random. It's a reprise of Vietnam. We had a half a million troops on the ground there and still we couldn't manage to quell the insurgency. Ten year old kids were riding their bikes around Saigon tossing hand grenades into whorehouses where GI's were enjoying themselves.

We pay intelligence experts and ex-military people big bucks to issue turgid and incomprehensible reports to tell our leaders what I could have told them from day one just for the price of a drink. And then our leaders ignore the reports.

From England The Daily Telegraph reports that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had written to Mr Blair a year before the Iraqi conflict saying post-war Iraq would pose major problems. The documents demonstrate that the Government agreed with the Bush administration on regime change in Iraq more than a year before military action was taken. They also predicted that a quagmire would result from a post-Saddam occupation.

Bush's own CIA in July briefed him with a classified document that offered dire predictions for Iraq through the end of 2005. The best case scenario predicted tenuous stability by next year, and the worst case is all-out civil war. That report was made public this week and Bush doesn't want to talk about it. And he doesn't want to mention that last month was the bloodiest since the war began. He doesn't want to mention that the resistance has grown. All he wants to talk about is Carl Rove's mantra that Kerry is flip-flopping. This writer prefers someone who can change his mind in search of the truth to a president who is a downright liar. Iraq is a disaster and it's only going to get worse and Bush keeps insisting that we are winning, that somehow mysteriously democracy is going to set in, even though there are daily bombings and attacks. The resistance will continue. For years. Until the oil is gone.

If America were invaded, I would have a secret automatic weapon under the floorboard of my house. How about you?

Though we haven't found the fabled weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we have created a weapon of much greater destruction. What is this weapon? It is the resolve of a people and a culture and a sovereign country who have been invaded by what they see as a despotic, monolithic, imperial power. All the prophesies of zealots like Osama bin Laden have been borne true in the eyes of the Muslim world. Our failed incursion into Afghanistan and our hasty invasion of Iraq are beyond the fundamentalist Muslim's wildest dreams as perfect recruiting tools for their cause. The poppy fields are up and running again and young believers all over Islam are looking to sign up with any terrorist organization that claims it wants to rid their lands of the infidel.

The Bush propaganda machine continues to drill you with absurd claims that somehow we are achieving our goals in Iraq, while daily the death toll and the violence mounts and continues, You see, Bush doesn't even know when he's telling a lie because he has been led to believe, in his small bubble of reality, that these lies are true. It's easier for the deluded to delude. They believe themselves. The lie detector doesn't even budge.

In The Poet's Eye it appears that the real "catastrophic success' will be if Bushco is re-unelected.

[abcrystcats]

This is one of your best, yet. I see minor changes that need to be made, but knowing you I am sure you are already making them.

Some comments:

"This writers prefers someone who can change his mind in search of the truth to a president who is a downright liar."

Thank you. This is exactly what I have been telling Neocon Brother.

Your article made me think of something: Perhaps they planned a quagmire in Iraq. As you've pointed out, I think, an ongoing conflagration in another part of the world has certain advantages for the Bush administration -- including his probable re-election. Ugh. It's quite nice for him to have all this unfinished business to take care of, including the continued search for Bin Laden and the nonexistent WMD.

Why does this war look more and more every day like the aftermath of the OJ Simpson trial and his search for the "real killer"?

[mnaz]

This is on-the-money from where I sit. Good one, L-Rod.

Slight typo, seventh paragraph... change "This writers" to
"This writer".

[Dave The Dov]

When George Bush Goes Off Marching To Stupidity

Harrah

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