Fanning the Flames of War

[arisbe]

With the so- called Sunni triangle in flames after the gruesome Falluja attacks, why is Bremer pushing the comparatively calm Shia south into battle?

Here's one possible answer: Washington has given up on its plans to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, and is creating the chaos it needs to declare the handover impossible... --Naomi Klein in Baghdad, from The Guardian

Comments

The "Big Lies" of the Thirties and Bush's

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

Hitler did not look like what he WAS in 1936, and anybody who'd have DARED to say that the Fuhrer was a monster or a genocidal maniac would have been "beyond the pale" in polite society in England, France and America. Believe me, I know, I've read the history of those pre-war times and they have a weird other-worldly feel to them.
By the same token, this President is a monster, who believes, deeply, that Muslims are untermensch. Oh, I know the words belie that. Please stop heeding the words; they're meaningless, like Hitler's idiotic, illogical, "Big-Lie" babble; instead, pay attention to the ACTIONS: under Bush America is literally TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.

The real motivations for recklessness?

[marginaleye.livejournal.com]

When people know that they've gotten themselves into an impossible situation, when they know that they're "in over their head" and thus can't cope, they tend to become accident prone, because they unconsciously want to fail, because failure means being able to drop the heavy weight, descend from the precarious heights, and live at a more comfortable level. I wonder whether this can happen to whole nations. If the United States were a person, I would wonder whether it wants the burden of empire (and that of not just keeping up with the proverbial Jones, but constantly surpassing them) violently torn away. Or perhaps it's just a sick combination of ordinary rapacious greed, adolescent cravings for revenge and adventure, and narrow-minded racism and provincialism.