more bombing iraq talk - isn't this just groovy?

:… the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million.”

The NYT today is very worried that if the US doesn’t act, a humanitarian crisis will erupt in Iraq. The cause of the crisis is Isis. And yet, my quote from the Times is not from today – no, it is from May 13, 2007. At that time, Iraq was suffering from a bigger invasion force than any mounted by Isis. The force was called the US Military. They’d been sowing chaos and massacre for four years by this time, and yet there seemed to be no call going out there from any of the major thumbsuckers to bomb Washington D.C. until they withdrew.

Funny that, eh?

I’ve been surprised – which shows how dumb I am – how quickly the hawk narrative has caught on among the punderati, the VSPs. In another recent opinion page piece, the NYT invited  seven figures to debate the question: Is it right that the United States become more involved militarily in Iraq? Of course, this is a question no Iraqi could handle, which is why the seven respondents were all american, with one Iranian american thrown in for good measure.  Two were women who’d been involved in the Bush end of the war on terror, from the perspective of which they could suggest ample measures to make American policy in the Middle East even more of a fucking disaster than it is now.

Because America thirsts for good guys before they pay for bloodshed – as every summer action flick shows – the Kurds have been amped up as the good guys of the moment. I was surprised and pleased to see Steve Coll push back against this meme in a recent New Yorker piece – perhaps stimulated by his colleague Dexter Filkin’s neo-connish rants about Iraq, and Obama’s incredible failure to plunge into the country as into an inviting  swimming pool – one filled with blood! - with soldiers galore – such fun it was the last time!

It has been 11 years since the US, under a criminally negligent president, invaded and occupied Iraq, with results that we can all see. And yet, incredibly, the same old krewe of morons that urged that adventure are now popping up all over the media to urge another. It is a sign of what a sclerotic plutocracy America has become – its elites learn nothing.