>
> No fucking shit. You win the restatement of the obvious award today.
>
> Doug
I will take an award for the obvious over a pension for the surreal any day. But just to show what I nice guy I am: I hereby claim the award in your honour!
But seriously the point I was trying to make is that if you are looking from the outside it appears pretty irrational (in terms of means and ends). Only those who are on the inside will be able to know what the ends are and thus have a capacity to judge the rationality of the means. From the outside, in these contexts, it always appears as an inexplicable spasm of barbaric violence. And for sure barbaric violence may be a tool here (although of course the whole thing was made possible by the initial act of barbarism ie the invasion). But we should assume that there is a point to those acts of barbarity even if we think they are counter productive to whatever ends are being contemplated.
Done the road we might find out that these acts were ostensibly the result of foreign direction aimed at destabilizing Iraq to the point of non-governability and thereby undermining any possible success of a US backed ruling bloc. The thing is I do not know but I am pretty sure it is not a spasm of irrational barbarism.
Travis