Vide the Brookings O'Hanlon, who has run up the GMTFON white flag on Iraq. How many times did we have to hear the soothing pseudoscientific "we're in control" murmurings of this stink tank pundit bob up on the cable channels? Eat shitty crow pie and enjoy it, schmuck!
I don't share Dougs' optimism. Shrub's Excellent Middle East adventure should have been a ruling class no-brainer. But it wasn't, was it. Let's never forget: They all so very much wanted the Bush Gang to succeed! Go Bush! Much to their chagin, it hasn't.
Vietnam at least had a comprehensible ruling class rationale: anticommunism. This adventure did not: it was always nothing more than a Likud-inspired drive-by Arab killing spree. Why should the "mainstream" have come under this influence after having been more than happy for decades to support every imaginable kind of autocratic repression exercised against the Arab peoples?
You know my answer: American ruling class paralysis before a looming crisis in the general position of US imperialism in the world. The result will be its demotion, to unknown degree, in global status, with equally unknown domestic political-economic repercussions. A new era will then begin.
We should be more concerned about the persistence of a substantial core of _mass_ support for the Shub, ~40% it seems. I doubt this is "loyal Republican" support. Unlike the queazy ruling class, these are not fazed by reports of the massacres and torture of Arabs, since I believe that "Kill Arabs" is what this crowd signed on to, and are therefore encouraged by such reports to see Bush as a "strong leader". Why do you think Kerry lies low on the Middle East? He reads the polls, that's why.
This should be of great concern to us. Now, in the future, how is this reactionary mass going to respond to America's coming demotion in the world order?
-Brad Mayer Doug posted:
Isn't 'shroomville seeming kind of marginal these days? The Freepers and the Murdoch media may be waxing vengeful - the NY Post had a "WMD" headline on that stinking sarin shell - but it's not really taking off in the mainstream, where the sarin story was a dud and new abuse stories surface daily. As I recall, when the New Yorker turned against the Vietnam war it was a sign that elite opinion was shifting - but that was like 1969 or 1970, years into the disaster. Hersh had a hard time selling the My Lai story. Now you've got Hersh pumping out horror stories in every week's NYer. Am I being too optimistic?
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There are still many hard core believers who turn every bit of bad news into a jujitsu flipped confirmation of the righteousness of whatever utterance issues forth from Team Bush.
Even so, if the blogsphere is any indication (and it counts for something I suppose) the believers' offensive has been seriously countered -- it's no longer possible to shout "9/11! 9/11! 9/11!" repeatedly to cower your opponents into quiet submission. Now, when they yell "9/11!" the counter-shout is "dumb-ass!" as in, "hey dumbass, your war isn't helping, in fact, it's hurting things and if you can't see that, you're worthless!"
The comfy chair warriors are stuck with formulas -- we're bringing democracy, better to fight "The Terrorists" (soon to be an exciting, summer film) on their home turf rather than in Topeka, Kansas, Saddam had "weapons related programs" and was a global threat -- and so on and so forth.
Their debating adversaries however, have reports (updated almost daily) of deception, ineptitude, cruelty and corporate graft -- a devastating quiver of arrows -- and can deftly parry each thrust with nearly real-time assesments of how far things are from the warriors' rosy vision.
Perhaps most devastating of all to the war bloggers and allied trades people has been the increasingly loud sound of bona fide conservatives and unapologetic imperialists slapping Team Bush upon the buttocks for its many, many failures. When you quote a Pat Buchanan a Brent Scrowcroft or a Zbigniew Brezinski, it's damn near impossible for folks to paint them as latte lovin libruls.
And Hersh? He's like the hammer of Thor delivering the smack down to Surtur, a one man multiple targeted missile -- at the rate he's going there'll be grounds for tossing almost the entire senior staff of the US government into the slammer (not going to happen but the evidence will be available nonetheless).
The 'shroomers' can still make a lot of noise, but their shouting is sounding, as you say, more and more marginal with each pasing day.
.d.