By PHK
The chickens may be returning to the roost, but where does that leave us now?
This has not been one of those sultry "Porgy and Bess" summers when nothing happens as the fish jump and the cotton grows high. It’s a summer when most everything has gone wrong – from creationists flogging – seemingly successfully – their latest bid for supremacy-of-the-blind through the teach-the-intelligent-design-canard which will dumb down US high school science education even further to hurricane Katrina destroying much of the colorful city of New Orleans thanks to rising temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet since the canny Cajuns apparently built the oldest part of this low-lying city on higher ground than those who came later, the Old French Quartier, at least, might still be there – or at least salvageable. Does anyone know?
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has told us that global warming doesn’t exist. So why should the U.S. sign the Kyoto Protocol? This international agreement is only a first, timid step on the way to help slow climate change and thereby retard submersion of coastal cities throughout the world - including our own. Maybe Bush’s EPA should rethink its head-in-the sand policies? Sometimes hard science and the scientific method do offer something of practical value. I’m not saying Kyoto would have saved New Orleans, the treaty is foremost a symbol of intent, but more real and immediate attention to the deleterious effects of global warming might make a difference for Venice or even Charleston’s “Catfish Row” in the future.
Then there’s Plamegate –or Rovegate depending on your perspective and the imbroglio in Iraq becoming – well – an ever bigger imbroglio. The new U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilizad now says that the infant Iraqi constitution can still be changed before it is submitted to the voters in October despite the painful drafting process with its multiplicity of missed U.S. imposed deadlines. Regardless, W has just spent five oblivious weeks of this long, hot summer cycling away in Texas – assiduously toning and tanning, I suppose, his brawn – but certainly not his brain.
The U.S. military has occupied Iraq for over two years and recent Zogby and other polls suggest that as many as 60 percent of Americans (mostly Democrats and independents) have now concluded that something is wrong. The slam-dunk war that the administration advertised hasn’t lived up to its billing. In fact, most of the people in 2002 and 2003 who swallowed the administration’s propaganda were Americans - so even at home the tide has begun to turn. Part of the problem then was the complicity of the American media – beginning with Fox News and ending with the New York Times’ own Judith Miller. Is the MSM now beginning to reflect American unease? Or not. It's sometimes hard to tell.
Today, from what I understand, 75-77% diehard Republicans still support the President right or wrong – regardless of the direction he steers his bike handles. And, at least some of these same diehards brand those of us who question his wisdom as traitors to Old Glory and the Statue of Liberty.
But hurricane season is indeed upon us as Katrina’s wrath has clearly demonstrated and that includes ravages - well beyond New Orleans - on the increasingly tattered banner of the W administration. The President and his neocon henchmen still do retain the upper hand, however, because of the lack of cohesiveness among the majority or so of Americans who have now concluded that current U.S. policies in Iraq have reached a dead end.
I see the skeptics as divided into three basic groups: 1) those who want to cut the losses and pull out now regardless of the consequences to the region and - because of the oil reserves – the world; 2) those who want to continue doing what is being done militarily but increase the number of troops; and/or 3) those who think the war can be won if only the military strategy changes.
Cindy Sheehan represents the first category and Andrew Krepinevich with his all-this-week’s-rage “oil spot strategy” falls in category three. But how valid is oil spot or, for that matter, any other “Iraq winning” strategy? (To Be Continued)
Note: Thanks to CKR for the reference to the reporting on the New Orleans catastrophy on "The Tattered Coat", the link to Krepinevich's article in Foreign Affairs from Armchairgeneralist, and the article in the New York Times by Cornelia Dean "Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much."
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