| GREG-STRANGE.COM |
"If you haven't found something strange during the
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
PROVIDING SUBSTANTIVE COMMENTARY ON THE
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
Iraq Study Group? No ISG, Please
If you, like myself, are among the few people left who
seriously want the United States to win the war in Iraq, it’s
becoming harder and harder to crawl out of bed each morning
not feeling like a nattering nabob of negativism. I don’t mean
that infamous alliterative string of verbiage in the same sense
that it was meant by former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew
when he used it in a speech in 1970. At that time he was
referring to all the anti-Vietnam War types:
“In the United States today, we have more than our share of
the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their
own 4-H Club -- the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of
history.”
Apparently, White House speechwriters of the time, William
Safire and Pat Buchanan, were vexingly vivacious with
alliterative turns of phrase. Be that as it may, when I talk
about feeling like a nattering nabob of negativism I’m talking
about my growing dismay with what seems like an inescapable
tendency on the part of most Americans towards finding some
kind of way out of Iraq that doesn’t include anything remotely
resembling victory.
Just the other day, for instance, the long-awaited and much
ballyhooed Iraq Study Group (ISG) report finally came out and
. . . Well, let’s just say that it was a bit of a disappointment,
though not an unexpected one. Sort of like those semi-regular
Charles Manson parole board hearings. There’s no way the guy
is ever going to get any good news and he knows that going in.
Iraq Study Group? ISG? Give me a break. Five minutes into
the presentation it was already being called the Iraq Surrender
Group. Talk about an acronym designed for ridicule. How
about the Insipid Seniors Gathering? Or maybe the
Incontinent Senile Geezers. Ba-da-bing! And then there’s
Incessantly Surreal Gabfest. Or maybe Inducing Snores and
Guffaws. Hey, I got a million of ‘em.
But seriously, folks. This thing is filled with nothing but
hackneyed platitudes and useless suggestions that have
already been talked to death by every radio and cable tv talk
show in the country. The guy who cuts your hair or drives you
to the airport could almost certainly have come up with better
suggestions. That’s because barbers, cab drivers and other
denizens of the workaday world are often imbued with more
common sense than the average think tank blowhard or has-
been politician who operates almost exclusively in the
theoretical.
Nonetheless, members of the mainstream media, who
consider themselves to be members of a small, elite group of
the planet’s most enlightened, were simply bowled over by the
ISG report. In fact, if journalistic protocol had allowed for
applause, the reporters would have brought the house down
and then held up lighters for an encore. Why? Because the
report basically confirmed what they already believed and were
dying to hear in some sort of official capacity: that a victory in
Iraq is impossible and that the time has come to negotiate with
enemies such as Iran and Syria in order to facilitate some sort
of honorable retreat from the country.
Of course, the media was never interested in a victory from
the get-go since they saw the whole thing as nothing more than
a craven Bush/Cheney/ Halliburton oil and power grab.
Present them with the many credible reasons for going into
Iraq and here’s what you’ll get:
Sure, Saddam was a bad guy, we can all agree with that, but
war never solves anything. Mass graves in Saddam-ruled Iraq
filled with hundreds of thousands? Yes, but at least the
country was stable then. Saddam had his guys daily shooting
at our planes that were there to enforce the no-fly zones? Yeah,
but most of the time they missed. Saddam paid $25,000
bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers? Okay,
but it’s not like he was in cahoots with al-Qaeda and planned
9/11 with them. Saddam was in violation of umpteen UN
resolutions? Please, so is Israel. Every intelligence service on
earth said he had WMD? Lots of countries have them, but we’re
not invading them. Oh -- and did we mention that war never
solves anything and the ISG report is the final conclusive and
resounding proof of that? We told you we are all brilliant!
So what exactly did the ISG geniuses come up with in the
way of advice on how to solve the problems in Iraq? There are
79 official recommendations, among them these gems: Work
on a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict and engage the
Iranians in serious diplomacy. Regarding the former, don’t
make me laugh. Regarding the latter, ditto.
Okay, so I’ve cherry-picked two of the most preposterous,
but c’mon, talk to Iran? Sure, okay, but we’ll probably need to
wait at least until after the big conference they’re having this
week whose goal is to once and for all debunk the idea that a
Jewish Holocaust ever occurred. And then we’ll have to
somehow work it into President Ahmadgenocide’s -- er, I mean,
Ahmadinejad’s -- busy schedule of daily speeches in which he
brags about the progress of Iran’s nuke program, routinely
calls for the destruction of Israel and threatens the West with
extinction if it doesn’t get right with Allah.
Most of the ISG’s 79 recommendations are either
breathtakingly obvious platitudes or utter fantasies that don’t
have a chance in hell of ever happening in most of our
lifetimes. In that vein, let me toss out my suggestion for
number 80: We should work to convince everybody in the
Middle East to give up and renounce fanatical Islam so that the
cycle of terrorism can be ended and the region can finally enter
the modern world.
There, now no one can say that all I’ve done has been to
criticize the magnificent ISG report without coming up with
any alternative suggestions of my own. Hey, all in a day’s work.
I now look forward to all the think tank invitations that should
soon be pouring in.
If you, like myself, are among the few people left who
seriously want the United States to win the war in Iraq, it’s
becoming harder and harder to crawl out of bed each morning
not feeling like a nattering nabob of negativism. I don’t mean
that infamous alliterative string of verbiage in the same sense
that it was meant by former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew
when he used it in a speech in 1970. At that time he was
referring to all the anti-Vietnam War types:
“In the United States today, we have more than our share of
the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their
own 4-H Club -- the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of
history.”
Apparently, White House speechwriters of the time, William
Safire and Pat Buchanan, were vexingly vivacious with
alliterative turns of phrase. Be that as it may, when I talk
about feeling like a nattering nabob of negativism I’m talking
about my growing dismay with what seems like an inescapable
tendency on the part of most Americans towards finding some
kind of way out of Iraq that doesn’t include anything remotely
resembling victory.
Just the other day, for instance, the long-awaited and much
ballyhooed Iraq Study Group (ISG) report finally came out and
. . . Well, let’s just say that it was a bit of a disappointment,
though not an unexpected one. Sort of like those semi-regular
Charles Manson parole board hearings. There’s no way the guy
is ever going to get any good news and he knows that going in.
Iraq Study Group? ISG? Give me a break. Five minutes into
the presentation it was already being called the Iraq Surrender
Group. Talk about an acronym designed for ridicule. How
about the Insipid Seniors Gathering? Or maybe the
Incontinent Senile Geezers. Ba-da-bing! And then there’s
Incessantly Surreal Gabfest. Or maybe Inducing Snores and
Guffaws. Hey, I got a million of ‘em.
But seriously, folks. This thing is filled with nothing but
hackneyed platitudes and useless suggestions that have
already been talked to death by every radio and cable tv talk
show in the country. The guy who cuts your hair or drives you
to the airport could almost certainly have come up with better
suggestions. That’s because barbers, cab drivers and other
denizens of the workaday world are often imbued with more
common sense than the average think tank blowhard or has-
been politician who operates almost exclusively in the
theoretical.
Nonetheless, members of the mainstream media, who
consider themselves to be members of a small, elite group of
the planet’s most enlightened, were simply bowled over by the
ISG report. In fact, if journalistic protocol had allowed for
applause, the reporters would have brought the house down
and then held up lighters for an encore. Why? Because the
report basically confirmed what they already believed and were
dying to hear in some sort of official capacity: that a victory in
Iraq is impossible and that the time has come to negotiate with
enemies such as Iran and Syria in order to facilitate some sort
of honorable retreat from the country.
Of course, the media was never interested in a victory from
the get-go since they saw the whole thing as nothing more than
a craven Bush/Cheney/ Halliburton oil and power grab.
Present them with the many credible reasons for going into
Iraq and here’s what you’ll get:
Sure, Saddam was a bad guy, we can all agree with that, but
war never solves anything. Mass graves in Saddam-ruled Iraq
filled with hundreds of thousands? Yes, but at least the
country was stable then. Saddam had his guys daily shooting
at our planes that were there to enforce the no-fly zones? Yeah,
but most of the time they missed. Saddam paid $25,000
bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers? Okay,
but it’s not like he was in cahoots with al-Qaeda and planned
9/11 with them. Saddam was in violation of umpteen UN
resolutions? Please, so is Israel. Every intelligence service on
earth said he had WMD? Lots of countries have them, but we’re
not invading them. Oh -- and did we mention that war never
solves anything and the ISG report is the final conclusive and
resounding proof of that? We told you we are all brilliant!
So what exactly did the ISG geniuses come up with in the
way of advice on how to solve the problems in Iraq? There are
79 official recommendations, among them these gems: Work
on a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict and engage the
Iranians in serious diplomacy. Regarding the former, don’t
make me laugh. Regarding the latter, ditto.
Okay, so I’ve cherry-picked two of the most preposterous,
but c’mon, talk to Iran? Sure, okay, but we’ll probably need to
wait at least until after the big conference they’re having this
week whose goal is to once and for all debunk the idea that a
Jewish Holocaust ever occurred. And then we’ll have to
somehow work it into President Ahmadgenocide’s -- er, I mean,
Ahmadinejad’s -- busy schedule of daily speeches in which he
brags about the progress of Iran’s nuke program, routinely
calls for the destruction of Israel and threatens the West with
extinction if it doesn’t get right with Allah.
Most of the ISG’s 79 recommendations are either
breathtakingly obvious platitudes or utter fantasies that don’t
have a chance in hell of ever happening in most of our
lifetimes. In that vein, let me toss out my suggestion for
number 80: We should work to convince everybody in the
Middle East to give up and renounce fanatical Islam so that the
cycle of terrorism can be ended and the region can finally enter
the modern world.
There, now no one can say that all I’ve done has been to
criticize the magnificent ISG report without coming up with
any alternative suggestions of my own. Hey, all in a day’s work.
I now look forward to all the think tank invitations that should
soon be pouring in.