Further provocation

Alright, I’m freezing my bollocks off today at work because we’re finally having a winter here and buildings in this country are made out of plaster board (which reminds me of one of those apocryphal stories about Dubya as a young jock at college: he allegedly started up a football team called the Nads for no better reason other than to give himself the opportunity of holding up a banner during games exclaiming “Go Nads!”). Actually, I really should just wind up this blog altogether since there’s no way I can top the previous post. On the other hand, there’s always the hope that we can lure Rotten back in, and so because I can’t get any work done in this testes-numbing climate, so I’ll have to dedicate myself to provoking Rotten into another extended diatribe.

So what topic can we train our sights on next? Religiosity is a goody, but I’ll keep the powder dry on that one until I’ve read Christopher Hitchens’ ‘Why God Is Not Great’. Interesting chap that Hitchens: he did a great hatchet job in ‘The Trial Of Henry Kissinger’, labelling the former Secretary of State something like “a humourless toad with only the most tenuous relationship with truth”, and he’s generally one of the great contemporary polemicists, but then he comes out in favour of Bush and the invasion of Iraq and launches a withering attack on Noam Chomsky. Another ‘what the fuck?’ moment.

Equally weird is Bob Woodward’s defence of the Bush administration right up until his last book ‘State of Denial’. But then I guess I’m revealing myself as a naïve bumpkin again, as I was a little taken aback recently when I discovered that Woodward had always been a bit of a conservative and closet Republican, which explains why he had so many contacts in the Bush White House and gave Bush such a sympathetic hearing until not so long ago.

But then that view has been counter-balanced in recent years by the tsunami of titles sticking the knife into Prince of Darkness Cheney and court jester Bush (great Oliphant caricature). Has any other presidency ever achieved so little? Iraq is the petard that Bush and Cheney have happily hoisted themselves upon, and I reckon if Rotten doesn’t have an opinion about that little adventure then I’m a candidate for the Pulitzer for webbloggers.

Thomas Ricks piles up the evidence in ‘Fiasco’ that planning policy for post-invasion Iraq was a total train wreck from the moment the war started; sort of like rubber-necking at a frathouse initiation ceremony where blasts of narcotic cactus juice are administered anally by stomping on plastic bottles connected to rubber hoses inserted into the anus. Fascinating, but gruesome to watch and be on the receiving end of (okay, okay, we don’t have frathouses here, but we do have San Pedro cacti whose sap is very nasty stuff to take orally). I’ve postponed delving into either Mitchell or HST by starting into Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s ‘Imperial Life In The Emerald City’ and it has just the same effect. The State Department and Pentagon had a totally dysfunctional relationship and the White House remained detached from what was going on, apart from Cheney intervening to ensure the supercilious and mendacious Ahmed Chalabi was the preferred candidate for a post-war democratic Iraq. And great anecdotes from the Green Zone about the employment of pimply-faced graduates sent out to work for the Provisional Authority because they’re registered Republicans, or others who were given jobs just because they knew some Republican politician’s wife. Some low-level university academic with no administrative experience is given the job of running Iraq’s entire higher education system, but confesses that he was “a neoconservative mugged by reality”. It would almost read as if the invasion and occupation were invented as someone’s stand-up comedy routine if it weren’t for the hundreds of thousands killed as a result. And apparently soldiers over there are still brainwashed into believing there’s was a connection between Saddam and 9/11. Amazing.