gonewest

Republican plan for world peace and American hegemony:

Phase 1 - Find bee’s nest and whack with stick, repeat.
Phase 2 - …
Phase 3 - Celebrate world peace and American hegemony.

Sometimes you have to wonder about American conservatives; call them Republicans, neocons, modern conservatives, or right wing nut cases — it doesn’t really matter any more since they all get more extreme and harder to distinguish every year. I honestly think the underpants gnomes in an old South Park episode were more competent with their business plan than the Republicans are with anything that they get their hands on.

We were lied into a war in Iraq which took a stable, secular country that was (no matter how much we hated Saddam Hussein’s rule) a check against Iran’s influence in the middle east and turned it into a violent mess which is simultaneously:

1. A quagmire that consumes almost our entire capacity to field troops anywhere for anything (read: makes us little threat to anyone else).
2. A recruiting paradise for Sunni (i.e. Al Queda) terrorists.
3. An emerging ally of Iran (a Shia controlled country) which will probably help them cement their domination of the region in the long term.

This could not have turned out worse if we had let Colonel Klink run the war.

So how do we plan to fix this awful turn of events? Well, if you thought this country was lead by people who are grounded in reality, then you might guess that we are preparing to cut our losses and find a quick way out of Iraq that doesn’t require us to admit that we started an unnecessary war and then lost it (the “declare victory and go home” strategy) and then put some serious elbow grease into long term diplomatic efforts to re-stablize the region and limit the influence gain that we handed to Iran on a silver platter when we created this mess.

But then no one in the Whitehouse is actually sane these days, are they? According to this article in Vanity Fair, there is every reason to believe that we are about to try to fix our Iraq problem by launching a massive air and naval assault on Iran (with no ground troops to speak of to back it up, of course). Basically, having been stung by the bee’s nest in Iraq that we’ve been whacking for more than three years now, we are about to whack an even bigger nest with the naive belief that that will somehow solve our current problem.

I’m sure that will work though, after all, isn’t there an old saying that goes something like:

“If you accidently stir up a bee’s nest, be sure to find a hornet’s nest and stir it up too or you may get stung.”

Oh, and before you go trying to defend Republicans or other conservatives by claiming that this madness comes from the Whitehouse neocons and not the Republican party, remember that:

1. The Republicans in congress are still trying to give this administration’s insane Iraq policy cover by fighting tooth-and-nail against any votes to end, limit, or even disapprove of the war in Iraq or the recent antagonism toward Iran.
2. Neocons are still frequent guests on national media outlets and they are always treated as conservatives and as having “serious” opinions, even by other conservatives.
3. The more traditional conservative icons still frequent the national media outlets and still support the Iraq war (and the newer pre-attack “tough talk” on Iran) even when they are nominally critical of Bush.

Republicans, neocons, and conservatives may have recently started to lay the groundwork for distancing themselves from the miserable failure that is George W. Bush, but they also still support the insane policies that this administration has been driving for years and you can bet that 9 out of 10 of everyone who identifies as conservative still:

1. Hates Iran.
2. Knows the lyrics to the “Bomb Iran” song.
3. Would like to see it happen.

And that is just what Bush appears to be set on giving them.