IDIOCRACY

An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures (from the Iraqi Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue). The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly DOUBLE THE TOLL IN JANUARY. (emphasis mine)

The rising numbers suggested that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control, and seemed to bolster an assertion many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have made in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.
--"Number of Civilian Deaths Highest in July, Iraqis Say," Edward Wong and Damien Cave, New York Times, August 16, 2006.


The number of roadside bombs planted in Iraq rose in July to the highest monthly total of the war, offering more evidence that the anti-American insurgency has continued to strengthen despite the killing of the terrorist leader (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi).

Along with a sharp increase in sectarian attacks, the number of daily strikes against American and Iraqi security forces has DOUBLED SINCE JANUARY. (emphasis mine) The deadliest means of attack, roadside bombs, made up much of that increase. In July, of 2,625 explosive devices, 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they went off. (In January, 1,454 bombs exploded or were found.)

"The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels," said a senior Defense Department official…."The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time."
--"Bombs Aimed at G.I.'s in Iraq Are Increasing," Michael R. Gordon (author of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, published by Random House, 2006), Mark Mazzetti, and Thom Shanker, New York Times, August 17, 2006.


As U.S. and Iraqi forces focus their efforts on taming sectarian violence in Baghdad, Wednesday's bloodshed served as a reminder of the tenuous security conditions across Iraq, and how precariously the country teeters on the edge of civil war…

Lately…the Shiite-dominated south appears to be spiraling into an abyss of violence, fueled largely by power struggles within the religious sect.
"Rival Shiite Militias Clash in Southern Iraq," Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, August 17, 2006.


Unsure of the loyalties of Iraqi forces, U.S. officers sometimes lie to Iraqi army commanders about where they are going on joint missions and require Iraqi soldiers to give up their cellphones before leaving camp. Police are distrusted even more.

Ironically, as Iraqis increasingly fight among themselves, many look to the U.S. military to broker their conflicts.
--"Strife Moving Out from Baghdad to Villages: Shiites, Sunnis Vie for Control of Diyala Province," Ana Scott Tyson, Washington Post, August 16, 2006.


At a newsconference…President Bush himself weighed in on the subject: "YOU KNOW, I HEAR PEOPLE SAY, WELL, CIVIL WAR THIS, CIVIL WAR THAT." (emphasis mine)
"Snake Eyes," Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, posted online August 14, 2006, for the August 21, 2006 issue.


Id-i-ot/n/: a feeble-minded person requiring complete custodial care
--Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Idiocy, n. vacuity, vapidity, senselessness. See FOLLY. Ant., see INTELLECT.
--Roget's College Thesaurus



You know, since our Idiot in Chief likes to refer so very frequently to those sinister SOME PEOPLE all the time, as in, some people say…Well, I shall do the same thing.

SOME PEOPLE SAY that we no longer have a democracy, that in fact, we now have a burgeoning theocracy. Some people say we don't even have that. That, in fact, what we have is a dictatorship.

(One of those "some people" who worried about such a fate for this country was former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner, a Republican appointed by Bush's god--Ronald Reagan. Not to be confused with his personal savior--Karl Rove.)

But it wasn't until I happened upon a critical review of a movie due out this fall that I realized what we REALLY have in our government, from the White House on down: an IDIOCRACY.

I wish I could make a big joke out of this and play along with the spirit of the soon-to-be-released movie, starring Luke Wilson--one of those Hollywood silly fluffy goofy stupid things that appeals to our baser instincts--but I'm afraid that since the decisions made by this neocon Idiocracy are indeed matters of LIFE AND DEATH, then I fail to see the humor.

There are several important facts to layer onto the appalling statistics quoted in the lead of this post. For example--those 3,438 Iraqis who died in the violence in July alone?

Well, folks, that's just Baghdad.

Casualties outside of the capitol never make an official count because so many of the bodies are never documented--they're just dumped into rivers or into mass graves. And even if somebody somewhere counts them, it's hard to get that count reported to Baghdad because counting methods are haphazard and the grim and gruesome daily reality of life in Iraq tends to shred any semblance of organization and documentation.

Along with that, both the United States government and the military as well as the Iraqi government drastically underreport the levels of violence to the news media.

As far as American casualties go, there is much more to take note of than just how many soldiers and Marines have died in Iraq during these bloody months.

Like how many were maimed and mutilated. And who is putting those IED's in their path.


The number of Americans wounded has soared--to 518 IN JULY FROM 287 IN JANUARY. (emphasis mine) Explosive devices accounted for slightly more than half the deaths…

In addition to bombs, attacks with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small-caliber weapons against American and Iraqi military forces have also increased, according to American military officials. But the number of roadside bombs--or improvised explosive devices as they are known by the military--is an especially important indicator of enemy activity. Bomb attacks are the largest killer of American troops. They also require a network: a bomb maker; financiers to pay for the effort; and operatives to dig holes in the road, plant the explosives, watch for approaching American and Iraqi forces and set off the blast when troops approach.
--"Bombs Aimed at G.I.'s in Iraq Are Increasing," Michael R. Gordon, Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, New York Times, August 17, 2006.


More truth behind the statistics of sectarian violence in Iraq: It's spreading like a bloodstain.


…What U.S. and Iraqi military officials call a bleeding of sectarian strife out from Baghdad…

Sunni fighters are trying to push Shiite families out of the region (the mixed province of Diyala, which stretches from Baghdad to the Iranian border), while Shiite militiamen from Baghdad are moving in aggressively to attack Sunnis and expand their turf, the officials say…

"We see the challenges of Baghdad being exported," said Maj. John Digiambattista, operations officer for a U.S. Army battalion here.
--"Strife Moving Out from Baghdad to Villages," Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, August 16, 2006.


What the Idiocracy failed to understand when they launched this unbelievably poorly-planned, poorly-executed, and PHONY war, was that there are sectarian strifes going back to the days of Mohammed--sects peeling off immediately following his death, killing one another for centuries. Toss into that boiling cauldron the rivalries and hatreds between the Persians of Iran and the Arabs of Iraq. Add to the explosive mix several generations of brutal suppression by Saddam's Sunni minority of the Shiite majority--and you get even a vague idea of where the retribution starts and where it will never end.

Baathists loyal to Saddam started fighting back against the Americans and the Shiites the first week of the invasion in 2003, and the Secretary of Idiocy Rumsfeld refused to send enough troops to secure the huge weapons and ammo dumps that had been left by Saddam, thus giving them a limitless supply of ways in which to kill us.

After the bombing of the mosque in Samarra in February, one of the holiest of Shiite shrines, the Shiites struck back in vicious and savage ways, with the infamous militia Death Squads, and because the Secretary of Idiocy Rumsfeld and the Idiot in Chief refused to take any of that seriously enough, the militias completely and thoroughly infiltrated the new government in Iraq and have been slaughtering Sunnis with the government's blessing and encouragement and funding--in spite of public posturing to the contrary.

Meanwhile, the Sunnis who live in mixed neighborhoods, and whose loved ones are turning up tortured to death in the local garbage heaps, are begging the Americans to help them, while further north, in all-Sunni areas, they're still murdering Americans every day. (Apparently, they don't care that the Americans are protecting their Sunni brothers in Baghdad.)

Along with this, the Shiites are willing to set aside their hatred of the Persians in order to court the approval of the Shiites in Iran, who also send along money and weaponry to help in their brutal payback of the Sunnis.

But see, this is only the tip of the iceberg. You have to also realize that within the Sunnis and within the Shiites, there are separate sects within each branch of Islam that are fighting one another for power. Shiites fighting Shiites and Sunnis fighting Sunnis.

With the Americans caught in the middle.

That does not even touch tribal loyalties, or devotion and adherence to sheiks and imams--the imams set themselves up as religious leaders and preach from the mosques but many of them are no better than Tony Soprano--they run little fiefdoms and they want more power.

Oh, and we can't forget the differences between those who want a secular government; that is, one that is not run by sheiks and imams, where religion does not run the government, and those who want a theocracy very much like the Taliban--like Moktada al-Sadr, the wicked and charismatic leader of the Mahdi army militia who has fought openly against the Americans from Day One and who lusts for power; he also holds 30 seats in the Iraqi Parliament. (They say he has studied Hezbollah and wants that kind of influence in the government. During the Lebanon war recently, he bused in more than 10,000 of his supporters, wearing symbolic burial shrouds, to protest Israel and the United States.) And of course, there is another charismatic leader with another militia army who opposes Sadr, and...oh, never mind.

Generally speaking, the Sunnis are more secular than the Shiites. But it is the Shiites who, thanks to George W. Bush, now hold the power. The prime minister himself lived in Iran in exile during the worst of the Saddam years and maintains close ties with that country. Back when the Idiocracy was busy planning their happy little war, they relied heavily on , Ahmad Chalabi, another exiled Iraqi, for most of the bogus intelligence they then fed to Cheney to justify the invasion.

After putting Chalabi in power in the provisional government, the Americans learned that their Golden Boy had been selling intelligence on American troop movements to Iran.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we set out to deceive.

And I'm also leaving out the hatred of the Shiites toward the U.S. because, back in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush urged them to rise up against Saddam after we had pulled out of Kuwait and the OTHER Gulf War was over?

He then stood back and allowed Saddam to slaughter tens of thousands of them in retribution.

See, according to the book, FIASCO: the American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter Thomas E. Ricks, we knew they were doing it because even though we'd cut off their access to warplanes and maintained strict no-fly zones, we granted permission for the Iraqis to fly military helicopters, which they immediately used to destroy thousands of those deemed disloyal to Saddam.

And we did nothing.

I didn't even MENTION the Kurds and their ties to Turkey and the hatreds of the other two sects for the Kurds or how the Kurds are starting to fight one another up in the North.

Nor does this include the tiny--five percent--of "insurgents" who are actually al-Qaeda-funded terrorists who simply want to kill as many Americans as they possibly can.

And it does not account for the fact that every single one of these scenarios was predicted far in advance of this miserable failure of a war and THE IDIOTS WERE WARNED.

It's okay though. We've had sooo many "Mission Accomplished" moments, haven't we?


That insurgency did not die down when elections were held, when the constitution was ratified, when the government was formed or when the local leader of Al Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed. The insurgency rages on, and no one knows when, how, or if it might end…

Things in Iraq are not going to get better by themselves. The answer is not blind perseverance in staying a course that has demonstrably failed.
--"Meanwhile, In Baghdad…", editorial, New York Times, August 16, 2006.


And yet, while Iraq implodes, collapsing inward like a rotten empty building, the Idiocracy marches on, continuing to order its longsuffering troops into one disastrous strategic mistake after another, one poorly-thought out mission after another, sending the same troops in to face death over and over and over again while the country they are dying for is so very preoccupied with the fact that Desperate Housewives got shut out of the Emmy nominations.

And our Idiot in Chief remains clueless.


More generally…the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. "I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States," said another person who attended (a private meeting with Bush at the Pentagon.)

(on the meeting), "They wanted new insight, so they could better understand the arena in which they are making policy," said Mr. Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival." He said he got no sense that the Bush administration was contemplating a shift in Iraq policy…
--"Bush Said to Be Frustrated by Level of Public Support in Iraq," Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 16, 2006.


Okay, let me see if I've got this straight. There's a trumped-up WE'RE REALLY LISTENING meeting of Middle Eastern experts at the Pentagon with Bush in order to show that yes, he really does listen to differing points of view, because, let's see now, after invading a foreign country which posed no direct threat to the United States, fighting a bloody war there for three and one half years, losing tens of thousands of innocent lives and destroying or losing thousands of American lives…THEY WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE ARENA IN WHICH THEY ARE MAKING POLICY????

SHOULDN'T THEY HAVE DONE THIS FOUR YEARS AGO???

Oh, and by the way--they're still not going to change anything. So why bother to even attend their damn meetings?

Oh…but beware the Idiocracy.

Even idiots can be evil.

According to William M. Arkin, who writes for the New York Times on matters of national and homeland security, the Idiocracy is coming up with a whole new spin-package to cover up this catastrophic failure.

First, we went to war to remove Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which were a looming threat blah blah.

When that was proven to be a lie, we were suddenly battling "remnants" of the old regime and "foreign fighters" and "dead-enders" and the insurgency was "in its last throes."

When the "last throes" went on year after year, well, then, we were fighting to spread democracy.

When that didn't work so well, then it became, we are fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here.

After that, we were fighting until the Iraqi security forces could do their own fighting, so we could "stand down" when they "stand up."

But when the Iraqi security forces proved to be a bunch of traitorous dumbasses who started to fight EACH OTHER as well as aiding and abetting those who were fighting US, and the whole damn world knew that the Idiocracy had a major disaster on their hands…well, suddenly, we got a new "strategic communications" package out of the Idiocracy.

And here it is:

It's all al-Qaeda's fault.

That's right, boys and girls. According to the new White House talking points, the ONLY reason Shiites and Sunnis are cutting each other's throats, blowing each other up, and drilling one another's heads with power tools is that they are being STIRRED UP BY AL-QAEDA.

See?

It's not the Idiocracy's fault! Al-Qaeda did it!!!


The notion here is that nothing the United States is doing, nothing Israel is doing, nothing the West is doing or has done, contributed to the rise of al-Qaeda.

This is not wishful thinking.

This is blind and deceptive.
--"What Are We Fighting For? Not Democracy," William M. Arkin, New York Times, August 16, 2006.


On Wednesday, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the U.S. military's command spokesman in Baghdad, read from the core White House talking points on Iraq that the United States now faces an enemy in Iraq that seek to wear down the "will" of the American people…

This new anti-civil-war word war is a campaign, what the government calls, a "strategic communications" effort. The effort has many targets. In Washington, the target is the growing assumption that if there were a civil war, all bets would be off, that the war would have failed, that the Baghdad government would be doomed, and that the "stand up/stand down" strategy won't work. Strategic communications will neutralize this view.
--"In Iraq, It's All About Strategic Communications," William Arkin, New York Times, August 17, 2006.


Boys and girls, this is not funny.

It's not funny at all.

This photo-op president, who has treated this entire war like a political campaign, is continuing to do so, continuing to spend far more of his energies worrying about how to SPIN this war and MAKE POLITICAL POINTS with it than about HOW TO STRATEGIZE AND SUCCEED on the ground.

Now it's all about convincing the American people--just before the elections--when, mind you, we are INCREASING TROOP STRENGTH, NOT BRINGING TROOPS HOME--convincing them that this is NOT a civil war that our troops are furiously babysitting.

It's all about terrorism, see. Terrorists--the same ones who flew the planes into the towers--are causing all these problems in Iraq.

We are not accountable, says the Idiocracy. This is not our fault. And anyone who says so hates America and doesn't care about our brave troops like we do.

We're just putting it down George Orwell's memory hole--you know the one--the one where inconvenient truths are forgotten.


But whatever you think of the Democrats, the important point is this: They are not the party in power today…

What should worry the country is that the Bush team and the Republican Party, which control all the levers of power and claim to have thought only about this larger struggle, are in total denial about where their strategy has led…

Dick Cheney & Friends…(who focused) their public remarks on why Mr. Lamont's defeat of Mr. Lieberman only proves that Democrats do not understand that we are in a titanic struggle with "Islamic fascists" and are therefore unfit to lead…

Oh, really? Well, I just have one question for Mr. Cheney: If we're in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you "tough guys" fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine--just enough troops to lose--and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?...

Please, Mr. Cheney, spare us your flag-waving rhetoric about the titanic struggle we are in and how Democrats just don't understand it. It is just so phony--such a patent ploy to divert Americans from the fact that you have never risen to the challenge of this war…What a fraud!

Friends, we are on a losing trajectory in Iraq…We need to reassess everything we are doing in this "war on terrorism" and figure out what is worth continuing, what needs changing and what sacrifice we need to demand from every American to match our means with our ends. Yes, the Democrats could help by presenting a serious alternative. But unless the party in power for the next two and a half years shakes free of its denial, we are in really, really big trouble.
--"Big Talk, Little Will," Thomas Friedman, New York Times, August 16, 2007.