verging_on_random

Neo-con madness

December 9, 2006 on 7:50 am | In Uncategorized |

Remember how Saddam Hussein was constantly compared to Hitler by many supporters of the Iraq invasion? Displaying either appalling historical ignorance or a truly awesome level of irrationality, we were repeatedly told that not invading Iraq would be an act of ‘appeasement’. “Stop this crazy guy now or he’ll try to take over the world” they screamed, cheerfully ignoring the fact that Saddam had neither the means nor the ambition to do any such thing.

Anyway it looks like they were right in principle but wrong in the detail. It turns out it wasn’t Iraq after all that is bent on world conquest, it’s Iran. Yeah well I used to get the two countries confused too, you’d think they would have given them better names eh. How about this for a breathtakingly incisive piece of analysis:

Iran is a resources rich country of 69 million people (up from 39 million in 1970) led by fanatics not easily if ever deterred … Germany was a resources rich country of 70 million in 1939 when it launched its wars of aggression in its world region. At some point the U.S. will have to confront the “true menace,” and not by offering up its neighbors or its object of hatred, Israel.

Well they’ve convinced me. The spooky coincidences are overwhelming*. Let’s bomb the fuckin’ place into oblivion now I say!

One hopes that people who think like this have been so thoroughly discredited by the Iraq catastrophe that they no longer have any influence on American foreign policy. But I wouldn’t count on it. And the Bush presidency still has 772 days to run. You can do a lot of damage in 772 days, especially if you’re convinced that you’re on a mission from god.

*Except that Germany wasn’t ‘resource-rich’ in 1939 or at any other time before or since. But that still leaves the coincidence about population, which is overwhelmingly convincing to any right-thinking person.