An unfunny cosmic joke
This isn’t funny anymore. Actually, it ceased to be so quite a while ago.
After some 3,149 Iraqis were killed in June alone and 20,000 citizens of Baghdad — mostly the last tattered remains of the middle class — were driven out by militias during the last ten days of July, Chimpoleon takes stock of the situation:
And the security front is where there has been troubles. And it’s going to be up to the Maliki government, with U.S. help, to use the trained forces and eventually a trained police force to take care of those who are trying to foment sectarian violence.
Incredible. By standard scholarly definitions, there has been civil war in Iraq since 2004. And if democracy was “born quickly,” it was either stillborn or strangled in the cradle.
A few days ago, this entity that passes for a US President diagnosed the dramatic conditions a bit farther west:
[snip]
He returned to the theme later in the press conference: “One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles.“
I cannot improve on Matt Yglesias’ comment:
Obviously that assumes he was aware of it in the first place. Another possibility is that his lips just mindlessly mouthed some staff-prepared script. If that sounds far-fetched, consider this:
A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.
Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam–to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”
Sorry, I don’t know how to properly comment on that. I just don’t.
What I do know, and what in fact any fool with a newspaper must know, is that the New Middle East ™ and adjacent areas are turning out less than stellar under the guiding hand of this monstrous man-child. Here’s Daniel Levy summing it up in Haaretz:
Oh, and Lebanon — that tiny place with the adorable “Cedar Revolution” which until a month ago was a showcase for the “domino theory of democracy” — has been reduced to a smoking crater whose hitherto pro-American PM now talks like a Hezbollah spokesman without a beard.
Bush and his regime are a cosmic joke. Yet it’s been a long time since laughter was even possible.
Update: God help us. See Fred Kaplan on the Killer Chimp’s most recent press conference. To make this individual POTUS was an insult to the entire human race.
