Fred Reed on the Bush White House:
Help me puzzle out Iraq. I’m just a country boy, and don’t understand Advanced Thought, or high strategy, or anything else. I admit it. Tell me about Iraq – quick, 'cause it seems to be blowing itself all to flinders, and it’s hard to study something the which there ain’t no more.
Now, as I understand it from the White House itself, it’s all because of three diehard Saddamites, two terrorists, and an outside agitator. Yes. The White House says ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of Iraqis love us, and want us to bomb them and invade them, and starve them with embargos, and only a few soreheads don’t like it. And I believe the White House. You can only lie so long before you slip up and tell the truth. I figure they’re about due.
And:
But I want to understand about strategy. Yesterday, it said on CNN, the White House bombed a mosque full of people and killed forty of them, to make them democratic. It was because the two terrorists or maybe the outside agitator was inside. Being as I am unwashed and don’t know much, I’d have said it wasn’t the shiniest thought in the idea basket. You got a country full of people who take religion real serious, and so you bomb a church in the middle of services.
But what do I know? Somebody called Mark Kimmitt, a brigadier general, said to CNN, "When you start using a religious location for military purposes, it loses its protected status.” If they hid in mosques again, we’d bomb them again, he said.
Now that he has explained it, it makes sense to me. If bombing one church doesn’t make them democratic, and love us, then bombing some more churches will. It wouldn’t fly in West Virginia, but that’s a different culture. Arabs like being bombed.
Some folks would say Kimmitt has to be dumber than a bucket of catfish. I’m less sanguine. I’ve known catfish. Kimmitt makes a catfish look like Fifth Century Athens. If I were part of the Iraqi Resistance, I couldn’t think of anything I’d like more than some damn fool blowing up mosques. It would save fortunes on recruiting expenses.
"Fifth Century Athens." I like that.
Posted by Craig Ceely at April 12, 2004 11:17 PM