heres why were in trouble: the washington post reports that were starting a new army to oversee the iraqi colonial efforts. i mean, liberation. i mean—ah, screw it.
pertinent and horrifying excerpts from the article were totally predictable by any nineteen year old at a decent a&m college that’s got one foreign policy class under their belt. it doesn’t take a flourish for the tarot to predict congressman chuck hagel saying “I don’t think the American people fully appreciate just how long we are going to be committed here and what the overall cost will be.”
it also doesn’t take a crystal ball to hear the horror in the voice of captain burris wollsieffer, of the 3rd armored cavalry regiment, at american soldiers being shot at by an ak-47-wielding 12 year old girl: “It’s just weird. It’s totally unconventional . . . It’s guerrilla warfare.”
on the destruction of the iraqi freedom front, we have “senior army officials” meeting with a muslim cleric whose sermons include anti-american rhetoric. they’re asking him to cut the great white devil some slack, because they think there’s violent repercussions from his sermons. captain wollsieffer notes that “If [the preacher] keeps this kind of speech going, [the iraqis] are just going to attack us more and more.”
so the army is going to go tell a preacher to clam up, because they don’t like what he’s saying. not just a normal citizen, now—who should have the right to say what he thinks, anyway, and be a bit peeved at the whole invading-and-conquering-shock-and-awe thing, anyway—but a man of god preaching in a temple. i’ll let you draw your own conclusions from that.
i was wrong up above when i compared this to vietnam. this is vietnam from earth-x: where we won, and we established an empire that wasn’t based on freedom or the bill of rights or strong, well-made cars or coal or ideas that were just better than everybody else’s. this is the one in which we turn out to be the bad guy. it’s 2004, and the world doesn’t have the soviets’ greed to be afraid of anymore: but they very well may have us.
all quotes and facts in this essay are from the washington post article linked above.