Springtime for Dubya

I guess I'm just supposed to get annoyed at the president — Rove and the boys just love getting a rise out of people like me. Though I hate to encourage them, it is irritating as hell to watch or hear Dubya at one of his press conferences. I mean, there's something about an obvious idiot talking down to you that is just innately insulting. Then, of course, there's the scummy substance of what he has to say... like suggesting that he's only "protecting the troops" when he openly attempts to provoke Iran, thereby pissing off about half of the Shi'a Muslims in Iraq (in other words, 30% of the population). In a country where a majority already supports armed attacks against U.S. troops, how is this a good idea? Then there's Bush's speculation about how history will judge us if we "fail" in Iraq — let that happen and future generations will ask, "Where were they?" (Huh?) That's the boy in the bubble talking... and he's talking out his ass. We're the people of the future with respect to his decision to start this disastrous war four years ago. What the hell are we saying right now?

It's hard to say if Dubya is aware of it or not (there may be no institutional reason why he should be), but there is one narrow sense in which what he says is true. Future "deciders" — those who will inherit the dilapidated machinery of empire that Bush is now driving into the ground — might well deplore the failure of his Iraq project. It has, after all, been a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy planning to exert strong influence over the energy-rich Middle East, going back to at least World War II. So long as the region's oil remains one of the world's greatest strategic assets, our commissars will want to exercise control over it if only to maintain the option of denying those resources to our principal economic competitors. Defeat in Iraq — i.e. the U.S. abandoning its plans for a permanent presence and a congenial client state there — would mean a significant loss of influence in that part of the world. High stakes indeed for the imperial mandarin class.

Assuming for a moment that Bush knows this to be true, why would he risk this invasion and how could he have been so blind to the obvious dangers? Well... I think of it as somewhat like the plot of The Producers. I mean, you got Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom just so damn certain that "Springtime for Hitler" was going to be an immediate flop, they essentially bet the store on it. Bush and company had that kind of confidence in the success of their Iraq adventure. Remember, they were coming off of the invasion of Afghanistan (real easy to beat, because it had been blown up numerous times already), and they had the same visions of an easy victory chief executives have dreamed of since Desert Storm... even back to the Six-Day War. A few encouraging words from a drunk named "curve ball" and it's Fuck, we can't lose! So now what? Blow up the theater? Starting to look like it.

I know some watery liberals are almost afraid that the "surge" will succeed. They might remind themselves what success looks like. It looks like Fallujah. It looks like Guatemala. It looks like Afghanistan. That kind of success is truly something to fear.