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."

Iraq, Bridges and the Future

The Geek is feeling good. He has just received an ego stroke. It wasn't the intention of the two men at the Brookings Institute, but that was the result nonetheless.

Brookings released a study concerning the results of the recently concluded troop surge in Iraq. The conclusion was that the surge is working at least in the area of security. This means that the two gents at the think tank with all their expertise and access to sources denied the Geek have come to the same conclusion as the Geek.

In earlier posts the Geek has argued that success in counterinsurgency depends on the presence of boots on the ground. He has concluded based on history and a handful of vital and meaningful indicators that the increase of US troops in the past few months coupled with an improvement in the efficiency of Iraqi forces and better thinking on the part of local US commanders has brought about measurable improvement in our position in Iraq.

Not surprisingly critics of the war either ignored the Brookings report or scoffed at it. Leader of the scoffers is John Murtha who is also a very outspoken critic of the war. He simply overlooked that the report focused on the security portion of the Iraqi dilemma and he talked about the absence of infrastructure improvements. He noted correctly that electrical service in Baghdad is sporadic, generally being limited to two hours a day. He also properly pointed out the lack of clean water in many areas of the country, the slow return of oil facilities to full service, and other important deficiencies in the nation building department.

Murtha is bang on regarding the problems of nation building. He is also right when he alludes to the need for effective infrastructure if Iraq is going to emerge as a going concern.

He is right. But, his view is irrelevant. The fundamental requirement for nation building is an absence of wide spread violence. To build a nation, to construct and maintain all the components of a vital national physical plant, the first requirement is peace. It's hard to build an electrical plant, run an oil refinery, operate a municipal water system or provide educational and health services when truck bombers, roadside mines, snipers, saboteurs and death squads litter the landscape with bodies and ruins.

Get a grip, Representative Murtha. The Brookings boys focused on the prime target--the lowering of violence in Iraq. When that job is accomplished, and only then, can the real, substantial challenges of nation building be addressed with any remote likelihood of success.

Many politicians, journalists, and bloggers have been dilating on the collapse of the I-35 West bridge in Minneapolis. A major thrust beloved by many has been the linkage of this one incident to the deterioration of much of America's stock of bridges. The point is well taken.

The pressing problem presented by the backlog of scheduled maintenance for many components of the critical physical plant of the nation including bridges, roads, electrical grids, sewer systems, water systems and the like was raised thirty years ago. It has reemerged from time to time ever since.

The collapse of the I-35 bridge is simply the latest knock by catastrophe on the door of our collective consciousness. It is well for the knock to be amplified by journalists and politicians alike.

However, the Geek has noted with a lemon-sucking expression that all too many of the viewers-with-alarm connect the erosion of our infrastructure with the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are wrong. Wrong as a soup sandwich.

There are several reasons why they are wrong. The first is self-evident. Officials at all levels of government have been aware for more than a generation now that our collective physical plant is falling down all around us. These officials have known but made the choice to continue to defer critical maintenance, to put money into new construction instead of repairs, to keep taxes low, in short, to run risks.

The second reason runs in tandem with the first. We the People (or at least the less unaware among us) have known about the decay of our infrastructure. We the People have supported, even demanded of our elected officials that they build new highways rather than fix the old, that they keep taxes low even if it means risks. The old Vox Populi has spoken loud and clear.

After all, the risks for any one of us of being on the bridge when gravity wins is very, very low. But, the costs of increased taxes are right here, right now. The likelihood of any one among us of dying from a waterborne disease because the water plant has packed it in or the crap has overflowed from the sewers is very, very low. The costs of taxes are again, right here, right now.

It strikes the Geek as more than a little hypocritical to scream now, more than a generation after the problems were first brought to our collective attention, that bridges are crashing all over the country because of the war in Iraq. If the charge is not simple hypocrisy, than it is something far worse.

Base exploitation of an undeniable tragedy for political gain.

Hell. If those who blame the war in Iraq for sucking away the money needed for infrastructure repair are really so worried, why don't they suggest taking the money from some other segment of the Federal budget?

They might demand that more of the bloated Highway Trust Fund, which takes a good chunk out of all our pockets every time we pump a gallon of gas, be earmarked for repairs and less for new construction. Remember that the HTF money is there. It can be spent to fix bridges as well as potholes.

The hand-wringers might even demand that money be removed from the totally out of control Agricultural Subsidies bill recently passed by Congress. Just taking a couple of billions out would fix a lot of collapsible bridges and still leave oodles of boodle for agribusinessmen.

The Geek could go on, but he won't. You get the idea, the money is there in bins far removed from the war in Iraq. If we have the political will, it can be redirected.

Remember, if we lose in Iraq, the future will hold a lot more deaths and destruction than that inflicted either by the collapse of the I-35 bridge or the events of 9/11. Unless we want our future to consist of living in fear, huddled in a garrison state, we have to keep on in Iraq. We may not win. We must not lose.

Our future demands it.

And, perhaps soon, a couple of bright lads at some think tank will agree with the Geek. It's happened once. It could happen again.