The War Is Stupid
A few years ago, I felt that I needed a simple phrase that would distill everything I needed to know about the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States into one simple sentence. The phrase came to me as if it dropped out of the sky and bonked me in the noggin.
The war is stupid.
It is. Every piece of it, any piece of it, the very idea of it, its aims, its implementation, its offered justifications, its every single solitary failure, stupid is, stupid does, stupid.
In discussing Iraq, I often find myself quoting a little movie that made a bit of a stir in 1983, “War Games,” a film that was likely the beginning of my unexplainable crush on Ally Sheedy, a film where the mega-computer Joshua about to end the world concludes prophetically that the only winning move is not to play. This is indeed the case regarding Iraq. Every time I hear a Republigoat whine that the Democrats don’t have any good answers, my reply is that it’s because there are no good answers, because the only good answer was used up in March 2003, the one where we don’t invade Iraq.
It was stupid to invade in the first place. There were only two tasks required of our government following September Eleventh, justice and peace, and our invasion of Iraq has accomplished neither and didn’t promise to during the buildup. Whatever evidence they had linking Saddam and the Al-Kahda was meager, tenuous, and not of a standard that justified this radical, immoral action. All other justifications offered up by this administration were feeble and irrelevant.
It was stupid not to do it correctly in the second place, not to provide enough soldiers, not to swiftly seize and maintain order, to fire all the Baathists creating a new, huge class of unemployed people, to hire cronies and political hacks for vital rebuilding tasks such as health care and financial markets, to invade while apparently ignorant of the local sects and the thousands of years of history behind them, and I do not have the time nor the capacity to finish this list.
It was stupid, perhaps most stupid of all the stupid, for the current president and his cronies to lie to you and to Congress to get us there. I really don’t have the patience to list all the lies, all the apparent justifications for the Stupid. See last evening’s episode of Olbermann for an excellent roundup.
The war is stupid, indeed. And last night, the current president shared with America that he had drawn a conclusion that only he could draw: We need more stupid. Extend the stupid. Throw good stupid after bad. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
This is why I was so thrilled this morning to see Congress beating up on Condoleeza. Listen to Republigoat Sen. Chuck Hagel call the Extension of The Stupid “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it’s carried out.” I have not heard music so sweet since the first time I listened to Led Zeppelin IV. Tear her a new one, guys. Make her cry. These dicks have proceeded sans resistance against The Stupid for entirely too long.
(The war is stupid. The end.)