Letters to the Editor
MereMortal
Published Letters: 151 Editor's Choice: 19
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To omit the truth distorts the truth
[Read the article: "America at a Crossroads" veers to the right]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Another fine Gary Kamiya article. I find it very heartening that he lays it all out here from clearly explaining that to Arabs the Palestinian problem is felt viscerally to explaining the dangers of conflating too many angry muslim causes as just one thing i.e lumping together Al-Qaeda, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hammas.
But then there is something very kitshy and 70s about this tired old lot of incompetent fools. Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz in their Team B days under Ford exaggerating the Soviet menace and lobbying for extensive re-armaments. There's something very electro-shock therapy about them too. They don't really understand what they're doing so they naturally incline to applying more electrodes and higher currents, and when the patient reacts in an even worse way, it's more evidence that they haven't applied enough.
The US and the Arabs had always held each other in great esteem. It's the Brits the Arabs despised as perfidious. They shared a fearful hatred of communists (to Americans they were against free enterprise to the Arabs they were Godless). The Arabs found the US's support for Israel hard to stomach but they still made common cause with them. The climax to this was the CIA backed effort in Afghanistan to oust the Soviets in late 70s and 80s. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the wall came down several Arab countries lost their Soviet patron and the US no longer had any interest in the Arab world except with regard to Israel and its oil interests. That's when the trouble started.
in 1990 Saddam was getting too big for his boots so they baited him to go into Kuwait [he was going to do it anyway] April Glaspie the US ambassador of Iraq said to him at the time "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts". Of course he took that as a green light and didn't sense a trap was being laid [he was a bit dumb like that] After that they punished him and his country for 12 years until they invaded it to get at his oil. The reason? well since there was no Soviet Union to turn to, the US could do what it liked, what were the Arabs going to do if they didn't like it? The cold war was over, who was the competition they could turn to?
Then in 2000 comes a coup d'etat that installs a Bush, bearing the disciples of Strauss. Strauss used to preach that the people need a common myth to hold the republic together and a common enemy. With a unipolar world a common enemy needed to be manufactured, let's not forget brezinski's famous remark "how can a few riled up muslims compare to the might of the soviet union". With the gift of 9/11 they sensed a great opportunity, so they planned and plotted to remove Saddam and control that part of the Middle East under a totally bogus linkage to 9/11, and when this act of outrageous stupidity and criminality was thwarted by Sunni insurgents the hackneyed old fools redouble their efforts, but they're at a loss to know what to do.
Team B mark II doesn't have a plan B, they put all their eggs in the success basket and they bet the house on it and lost everything.
The US body politic is essentially like a very dysfunctional person right now and what they need from their friends is not praise or support but admonitions to get some counselling and there is no worthwhile counselling without facing the truth. Gary Kamiya in pointing out that the patient is retreating into highly fanciful fantasies about his plight is thus a great friend to America and a true patriot.
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Wolfowitz in Sheepowitz clothing
[Read the article: Wolfowitz's girlfriend problem]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You'd think that Wolfowitz after the mother of all political and military disasters would want to be seen as whiter than white.
It beggars belief that once he walks away from the Iraq thang with barely any dust on his suit, he gets a cushy number at the world bank, and Whammo, he's up to his cronyistic tricks again bankrolling his girlfriend.
I agree with Elric that this administration and their alumni are a bunch of amateurs/incomplete people. What is staggering to me about them is how perfectly correlated is their ambition [via the dizzying scope of the tasks they take on] with their sheer incompetence and deceitfulness.
I agree with the other poster who reminded us that Wolfowitz has friends in high places and is being protected though much to the dismay of rank and file at the bank.
The comb licking is a real Ann Tyler moment. In one of her novels she describes a particularly fusty and staid man as someone "who regularly stayed in the bathtub until all the water ran out"