Out-To-Lunch Derby Field Widens

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have never struck the Geek as ovewhelmingly insightful about the United States or the West generally. Sometimes he has even doubted the basic intellectual horsepower of these Islamist icons.

Now there is no doubt about it. The Islamists are severely intellectually (and reality) challenged. The proof is in the voice over of the third al-Qaeda video released in recent days. Lest you think the Geek is exaggerating or quoting out of context, take a dekko at: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jZmfHcVGaptLhBv-cWxiqI2irdcw. You can trust the French press agency.

Against a montage of scenes from 9/11, terrorist training facilities, and similar paens of praise to violence past and planned, the narrator intones, "We must take Islamist terrorism to Western countries so that it becomes a normal part of life like natural disasters."

Get a grip, Islamist deep thinkers!

How can terror terrorize if it is a "normal part of life like natural disasters?" Talk about the what-does-that-mean? department!

The Geek has lived in hurricane prone areas of this country. He's even been through five of these big wind, big rain events. He saw no terror, no panic, no mobs running in circles, screaming and shouting in naked fear.

Of course, hurricanes in common with floods, tornadoes and tsunami can be and are reliably predicted. Precautions can be taken. It becomes a matter of routine.

Natural disasters may be exciting, too much so if it's your roof that blows off, but they are both non-terrifying and survivable. Even when government bungles the job of disaster relief and recovery, the result is not terrifying--except, perhaps, for the bunglers.

The al-Qaeda big brain has it wrong. But, he didn't stop with the one absurdity. Oh, no. He reaches for a new rhetorical height. Let's listen in---

"In that way we will have acts of mass extermination in which people feel their affluence also brings death... (ellipsis in original) and, we will have created a balance of deterrence between us and them."

If the Geek were one of these affluent Americans to whom the al-Qaeda man is probably referring, he would be much more worried about Hilary Clinton's health care funding proposals than he would even a Quran-reading, suitcase-nuke-carrying Islamist. Also, the Geek would like to ask the profound strategic analyst behind the words if he can define the word "deterrence."

Does it mean, perchance, how the events of 9/11 stopped the US from invading Afghanistan?

Perhaps the word means as Admiral Yamamoto hoped prior to the Pearl Harbor attack that the unexpected and devastating nature of the strike would throw the American public into "such despair" that they would abandon any hope of successful war against Japan.

John Murtha, Democratic Congresswallah from Pennsylvania, pulled neck to neck with the al-Qaeda strategists with his speech at the National Press Club yesterday. The Geek is not referring to Mr Murtha's total historical misunderstanding of the Vietnam War both there and in the US.

Nor is the Geek commenting upon the Congresswallah's analysis of Republican Party internal politics. That's not the Geek's concern.

What gives Mr Murtha a front rank position in the Out-To-Lunch Derby is his assessment of responsibility for the inevitable deadly chaos that will confront Iraq and its people following a premature American withdrawal. While the majority of the mainstream media gave the gentleman from Pennsylvania a free pass on this portion of his remarks, at least a couple of the alternative sources did not. Check them out to make sure the Geek is quoting correctly.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200709/NAT20070918a.html or, for the more religiously inclined, http://www.crosswalk.com/news/11554431/.

Mr Murtha averred, "Many have threatened that there will be chaos, a bloodbath, when the United States redeploys from Iraq, and this in fact may be the case." That was nice of him to concede the obvious. Then he continued, spoiling his flirtation with honesty. "If they continue to choose to spill blood, it will not be on the conscience of the United States."

Apparently, the Congresswallah has forgotten that it was our ill-advised invasion which started the bloodletting. While there can be no argument against the fact that the regime of Saddam Hussein was brutal, repressive, and violated human rights on a mass scale, it is also true that the internal body count under it was a lot lower than that which ensued after our exercise in "regime change."

So, Mr Murtha, if the post-withdrawal blood is not on our conscience, whose will it rest upon?

Not surprisingly, the gentleman from Pennsylvania has an answer--the Iraqis

To justify his position, Murtha shows the same ignorance of Iraqi history that the al-Qaeda heavy hitter showed about the United States'.

He maintained that the inevitable chaos would merely be "a continuation of decades of (Iraq's) own conflicts which they (the Iraqi's, the Geek presumes) and only they can solve."

Actually, with only brief and relatively low death toll spasms of violence, most of which was not sectarian but rather political in nature, Iraq has had a peaceful history for the past several centuries. Under the Ottomans as under Saddam Hussein and the Baathists before him, the lid was kept effectively on Sunni-Shia conflict. Under both regimes and even during the period of British "mandate", the ever ready to be restive Kurds were deterred from violent expression of their desire for independence.

So, Mr Congresswallah, where are the decades of conflict which only they can resolve?

Our invasion and the dreadfully pathetic policy of de-Baathification blew the lid off, urged discontent, assured the disaffiliated were armed, and encouraged through the lack of initial physical security for the population that an atmosphere of sectarian and ethnic strife would exist. That disaffiliated or ambitious Iraqis, both with and without external sponsorship or assistance, took advantage of the conditions we provided can scarcely be considered surprising.

Right?

Well, not to John Murtha, anyway. In his emotionally powered ideological frenzy, the forces of history as well as the basic American responsibility for the situation escape him completely.

Get a grip, Congressman Murtha!

We made the mess. It is our responsibility to clean it up. We have the moral--and self-interested--responsibility to restore a significant measure of stability to Iraq. Period.

Once security for the average Iraqi, the man who doesn't wave an AK, plant roadside bombs, or blow himself and others to bloody smears of protoplasm in a marketplace, then and only then is it the Iraqis' responsibility to maintain the peace. Or not. It will be their choice then.

But, not before.

Until security for the Iraqis on the streets and in the villages is established, the blood is on our hands whether we like the idea or not.

To put it bluntly, Mr Murtha, the Geek doesn't like your imitation of Pontius Pilate. We cannot and must not wash our hands of the Iraqis. For their future. And, for ours.

Rarely is the symmetry of ignorance so beautifully demonstrated as it has been with the nearly simultaneous displays presented by the al-Qaeda video and the Murtha speech.

To paraphrase a line from the movie Forest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid talks."