Is A Part Of
I’m suspending my previous policy of avoiding serious and/or political and/or important and/or global issues on this blog, because, well, up until now I really didn’t feel like writing anything about them. (The change in antidepressants must be helping.) Also, I had never before commented on Dibertist Scott Adams’ blog, but his current Serious Sunday topic was about the Future of Iraq and Adams’ own proposals, which shockingly have turned out to be very close to the proposals of the Iraq Study Group. While awaiting the inevitable breaking scandal about the Iraq Study Group writing cheat notes on their arms, I had to offer my own spin on the situation before I became too dizzy to continue spinning. As of this moment, my comment is in a moderation queue at the Dil-blog that is apparently longer than the line last week for PS3s, so I will regurgitate my comment here and now:
Considering “success” being anything better than “everybody dies”, there are many strategies for Iraq that history has proven are more likely for success than the course that Bush has stayed for the last three years. The only reason Bush chose the one he did was that it maximized the amount of money that could be skimmed, scammed or stolen by friends and allies. And let it be perfectly clear, the $N billion that was skimmed, scammed or stolen did go to friends and allies; if it had gone to enemies, the terrorists would have been able to purchase enough of the Former USSR Atomic Arsenal to level every major city in America except Houston and Los Angeles which are too sprawly.
Among those strategies that, I must emphasize, have been used before to less-than-totally-cataclysmic results are:
Finding somebody local for Henry Kissinger to negotiate with for a couple years in Paris over a table of as-yet-undetermined shape.
Lobbing in smoke grenades until one of them starts a fire.
Declaring the End of Iraq As We Know It.
Sending over Oliver North with a cake and a paper shredder.
Rocking the casbah.
Offering to trade all the guns for Tickle Me Elmo Xtremes and all the bombs for Wiis (but don’t include the nunchuks, you could hurt somebody with those).
Rounding up the usual suspects and ordering Sam to play it again for you.
Giving Keifer Sutherland 24 hours to fix it.
Giving Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte 48 hours.
Signing the entire country to do a new series on Fox then canceling it after 3 weeks.
Whatever Jonathan Swift suggested in “A Modest Proposal” (I’ve never read it myself).
I hope that, on this Serious Sunday, these strategies are given the consideration that they so richly deserve.
