Quagmire 2.0
January was a time of great jubilation for the American people — their new Democratic Congress arrived in Washington to take back both houses for the first session since 1994.
The Dems took their seats with specific instructions from voters to get us the hell out of Iraq. They responded with a non-binding resolution — a concoction consisting of equal parts Kaopectate and Milk of Magnesia. It was meant to sort of, um, suggest, if it wasn’t too much trouble or anything, that the president perhaps think about reducing troop levels in a war that two-thirds of the American people opposed. After several weeks of decisive Democratic language readjustments, the measure failed.
Throughout the year, the party of the donkey stubbornly nuanced its stances, leaving the Bush–Cheney White House no choice but to do exactly whatever the heck it wanted. And so, on January 10, Bush broke the ties that didn’t bind and announced the “surge.” He did it with inimitable humility, admitting that he’d made a mistake by not sooner sending enough of our children into harm’s way.
This increased troop deployment resulted in the bloodiest year of the war for Americans, and went none too lightly on the locals. But because casualty stats decreased over the last few months of ’07, Bush and his pie-eyed devotees deemed it the miracle they’d been expecting all along. No one dared suggest that perhaps violence had decreased because, after four years of foreign invasion, occupation, civil war, ethnic cleansing, and wholesale exodus, there just weren’t that many people left to wander into free-fire zones.
This relative lack of fresh targets, combined with some military body-count book-cooking, gave the appearance of an improved situation. As far as Bush was concerned, Iraq and its government had gained stability.
In truth, Iraq was so unstable that, even by US estimates, one-third of everything that America shipped into that nation was being diverted to the black market, a/k/a the insurgency (suggesting the real number is at least 50 percent). The country is now so thoroughly corrupt it makes post–Soviet Russia look like the home of the square deal. It actually would save money to stop bolting our things down in-country, because the loss of bolt-removing devices is running upwards of eight figures a week.
Bush is an insult that we’ve come to expect, but with the head pre-rotted, the rest of the fish grew increasingly gamey. Politicians, notorious for their sensitivity to polling data, developed a blind spot to the overwhelmingly poor approval rating given to the war in Iraq. In this alleged democracy, one-third beats two-thirds, providing the big money is behind the one-third. Land of the free, my ass.
Also from Iraq came the story of the brave men and men of a “private security firm” called Blackwater USA — the vision of all-American entrepreneur Erik Prince. A few years back, Prince realized that what this country needed was a way for the private sector to simultaneously profiteer on both temp workers and war. Before long, his troops, trained in North Carolina but welcome in health-care facilities nowhere, were drinking and shooting their way into the hearts of America and its swell new super embassy in Baghdad. Oh sure, they massacred their share of innocent Iraqis, but who at the State Department was about to complain about the drunk guys with the automatic weapons?
