What would Jesus say about the warmongers?

In one of those fits of risking our sanity for the sake of our blog, LI went and read the fucks. We read the fucks last week in the New York Times, explaining what went wrong in the war. Of course, the only way to commemorate five years of pointless slaughter is to ask the fucks who promoted it what they had to say about it. We are so all ears. And we read the liberal hawk fucks over at Slate. Contrarianism out the ass, over there – the general fuck consensus was that the shame of the war is that it is preventing another war on Iraq. Actually, a couple of years ago, in 2005, we made the sick joke that the only good thing about the Iraq war was that it was preventing a war on Iraq. Ah, the fucks – the vampires in their upside down world, rustling their leather wings for the blood, the glory, the shit, the proxyness of it all.

But it was the fuck Ann Marie Slaughter who concentrated our attention, over at Huffington Post. She took the highminded approach of contending that anybody who reminded her that she had helped initiate a slaughter leading to the death of about a half a million people and three million refugees was being so gross in the extreme. And she finished up her heartfelt fuck lament like this:


“I'll start by offering a metric for how to assess any candidate -- and any expert's -- plan for Iraq. The test for the best policy should be the one that is most likely to bring the most troops home in the shortest time (to stop American casualties, begin repairing our military, and be able to redeploy badly needed military assets to Afghanistan), while also achieving the most progress on the goals that the administration stated publicly as a justification for invading in the first place: 1) ensuring that the Iraqi government could not develop nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction (done); 2) weaken terrorist groups seeking to attack us (this goal was based on false premises then, but is highly relevant now); 3) improve the human rights of the Iraqi people; and 4) establish a government in Iraq that could help stabilize and liberalize the Middle East. No policy can possibly achieve all of those goals. But the policy that offers the best chance on all five measures is the policy we should follow, in my view. And applying those measures to concrete policy proposals is the debate we should be having.”

Of course, I’m not telling you a big secret if I tell you that the fuck’s don’t get it, still. To find a comparable mixture of vanity or rather narcissism, bloodlust, entrenched arrogance, blindness, and lack of analysis, you’d have to go through the court records of the Nuremberg trial.

So what don’t the fucks, the newspapers, the politicians get? Well, take a gander at Slaughter’s laughable list and it should strike you right in the face that these so called policy makers think policy is a shopping list. Since there is no chance they will be tried for their crimes and every chance they will be given the spurs and the bridle to mount us once again, hey ho silver, LI decided to give them some advice. When you write a shopping list, perhaps you should make the cost of the list part of your, you know, set of suppositions. To put it simply, five years out and none of these moral entrepreneurs, these specialists in humanitarian sensitivity, have the least clue that war is a project.

Now, here’s a little down to earth reasoning. Projects are constructed around goals, usually incremental goals, towards some end, with some deadline. It is not planned simply by envisioning the great payoff at the end – which comes, if it is successful – but it is always balanced against resources, manpower, and scheduling. In other words, costs are built into projects. Projects that are proposed without costs – such as the fucking insane shopping list presented by the aptly named Slaughter – are not things to be discussed, they are things to be laughed at.

Once a project gets going, it is vulnerable to a lot of things – and, in particular, to scheduling problems. The problem when a project doesn’t achieve step A at a certain time often requires one to adapt and revise the project; at a certain point, in perpetually delayed projects in which no step is achieved that was forecast, the payoff has to be written off, the costs have to be added up, and – most of the time – the project has to be completely reshaped or bagged. Let’s see, what would I say about a project that has burned through 600 billion dollars with projected future costs in addition of another 600 to 700 billion dollars that only has to go another, oh, four more years at the 200 billion dollar burn rate to perhaps achieve, well, we aren’t sure what. What can one say about a project that has succeeded in killing four times the number of people Saddam Hussein killed on his last killing spree – the war against the Shi’ite revolt in the south in 1991 – that has produced ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, a Taliban like state in Basra, three million refugees, and of course 4,000 American military deaths, a thousand mercenary deaths, 20 + thousand casualties – with the promise that those Iraqi deaths will be halved in the next four years. Goody! Only one hundred thousand Iraqi deaths to go! This is, of course, fuck advice from aliens.

So, how have the newspapers reported on the fucked up war? On this fifth anniversary, they still don’t fucking get it. One is amazed at the level of sheer stupidity. Take, for instance, the moaning and groaning about the disbanding of the Iraqi army. Here is what happened. Shinseki advised that the occupation would take 400,000 to 500,000 soldiers. Shinseki was laughed at and is not invited to write scintillating crap for Huffington Post, the New York Times, or Slate. Why did he advise that many soldiers? Did he think they’d be hanging around, handing out candy to grateful kiddies? No. One of the reasons he recommended that is because he knew, as all the fucks knew, as the whole world knew, that Saddam Hussein had an army of about half a million men. If Saddam Hussein surrendered, or was blasted into another sphere, which seemed 90 percent likely, there would still be 500,000 armed men. In these situations, you have to process the armed men, get rid of the bad armed men, and rebuild the army. To do this, you have to have enough soldiers to secure the country while you are processing this amount of armed men. There isn’t a shortcut here, fucks. None – although, being fucks, these people had no personal acquaintance with military life, having other priorities than serving, until of course it was time to give fuck advice. So, Bremer drops his dime, and there’s nobody to provide security, and there’s no way to process the army, and the country is, as anybody could easily predict from a country that has been under sanction for a decade, in fuck shape, and the insurgents start blowing up soldiers, collaborating Iraqis, and etc., etc. Everybody who supported this war knew what the figures were, knew what Bush was saying about the price. Everybody knew that was a gross, fucking lie. Either they knew that, or they are as pig ignorant as, say, Michael O’Hanlon. They, in short, lied American lives into a situation where it was clear they would be unsafe, and it was even clearer that 25 million Iraqis would be very unsafe, and all they have to say now is – hey, here’s my shopping list, where is fucking Santa Claus?

It is a disconnect so vast that it acquires a symbolic meaning all its own. These fucks are representatives of the gated community – not especially wealthy themselves, they are the talking heads for the oligarchy, and in their minds they are removed from it all. Slaughter no doubt thinks of herself guiding the yacht of state over seas of blood while her fellow liberal interventionists sunbathe on deck, occasionally cannonballing in, and laughing and having a good time – although the water is a little grodey, what with the eyeballs, the heads cut off, the dentistdrill holes in the faces of the dead corpses. I mean is that a children’s cute little ripped away finger on your bathing suit? Brush it off, man!

As Jesus said, the fucks you will have with you always, but (let’s see, where’s my Gospel) me, I’d kick their fucking asses if they tried that shit in my time, I really would.