Let’s recycle this story just once more and get back to Brittany
December 22nd, 2009
The
problem we face in Iraq
is that while the country has made
tremendous progress in both the security and
political realms, all of those gains are fragile and could
evaporate quickly if strained. What Iraq experienced was a lot like
shattering the bones in your arm: with time, the bones can heal
and the arm can become strong again, but if you take off
the cast too soon, then any strain on the arm
will cause the bones to
fracture all over
again.
As scholars
of civil war have warned,
states like Iraq that have undergone
a major inter-communal civil war have a terrifying
rate of recidivism—especially if the state has valuable natural
resources like diamonds, gold or oil. So to some extent, we and the Iraqis
are fighting an uphill battle. There is no reason that we can’t succeed,
but it isn’t going to be easy and it isn’t going to happen on its own.
And since we can’t know for certain when Iraq’s bones
have healed, we need to be very careful
about how and when we
remove the
The
problem we face with
The Daily Beast is that they’re fucktarded.
In their mad rush to keep us warm with celebrity bootlicking
and “chief investigative reporter” Gerald Posner’s breathless updates on
the dynamics of Tiger Woods’s international NetJets-chauffered
cooter-catching squad, they’ll stuff any old sandwich
wrapper at all into the slots
marked “Politics” or
“War” on their
site.
Iraq
has made progress in
security and politics? No one has a job or
electricity, sewage runs openly in the streets, a trip to the
market or the mosque is a daily pas-de-deux with the Grim Reaper.
If the Americans don’t run over you in a careening Humvee or the
Blackwater guys don’t ventilate you for not bowing in their
magisterial presence, your next-door neighbor will
blow you up or sell you to his particular religious
clan for a tea-time beheading
“to make a good
example”.
And
“major intercommunal
civil war”?! We violently occupied the country,
leaving guns and cash and tons of Saddam’s previously
secured anti-tank mines lying around in the open so people
could scurry them off to the next IED site. What follows seems
to have been written by the same people in the Pentagon who were
caught crafting news stories for Fox during Bush’s tenure: “So to some
extent, we and the Iraqis are fighting an uphill battle. There is no
reason that we can’t succeed, but it isn’t going to be easy and
it isn’t going to happen on its own. And since we can’t
know for certain when Iraq’s bones have healed,
we need to be very careful about how
and when we remove
the cast.”
How does
Tina Brown publish shit like that
with a straight face? She did a pretty darn not bad job
editing the New Yorker years ago, against all predictions, but
I guess a couple of decades of Louis Vitton-sponsored
birthday parties for Diddy will
soften anyone’s brain.
Yikes, lady.
