In Plain English For Slow Learners

I am consistently amazed by the display of willful ignorance on the part of a few of my fellow Chicago police officers running the popular Second City Cop Blog (see link list). Known simply as "SCC" in their posts, they never fail to respond to any challenge to approved conventional wisdom on US foreign or domestic policy with hysterical rants that are always short on analytical content but high in entertainment value.

In one of their latest posts (Whine, Whine, Whine) they rise valiantly in defense of the Prince of Darkness himself, "Vice" President Dick Cheney who let it slip in a recent interview that the Bush administration's legitimizing of torture and the suspension of habeas corpus in the ongoing War On A Tactic was something to celebrate. These are desperate times for neo-cons and their ardent supporters who can all read polls. No matter how the administration spins it, their policy in Iraq is an abysmal failure (to say nothing of an unconscionable crime) and Americans are finally fed up with it. This both angers and frightens the True Believers such as SCC who have invested so much of themselves emotionally in the neo-con global quest for hegemony--a quest that ultimately will be denied them since it is now abundantly clear that (1) most Americans are unwilling to go along, and (2) despite America's military might, that alone is not enough to force this agenda down the throats of the global South.

So what's a neo-con to do? Well of course, turn up the "terror" volume. There is nothing left to cling to so this will just have to do. In a credit to The Dear Leader, SCC turns in a tour de force. If I were less informed, their "arguments" would no doubt have me hiding under my computer. To be so ill-informed this late in the game, however, requires a tremendous degree of will-power. One must studiously ignore the voluminous public record that confirms Iraq played no hand in the 9/11 atrocities--that in fact secular Saddam Hussein and fundamentalist Al Qaida were implacable enemies. That intelligence analysts had warned in advance that an unprovoked attack on Iraq would transform that country into a seething cauldron of resentment of everything American. That America's hyper-aggression in the Middle East has served to make this already volatile region even more combustible. Lets compare and contrast the neo-con fantasy world illustrated by SCC in which America is virtually under siege, with the reality of a country under actual US occupation.

Iraq

The Iraqi WMD "threat", which had been the original justification for the US invasion without UN Security Council authorization and in defiance of international law, has long been exposed as cynical fraud played upon a frightened American public in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Next, after WMD were nowhere to be found (as UN inspectors had long maintained), the rationalization for the invasion and occupation of sovereign Iraq became the promotion of "democracy" at the barrel of M-16s. Tom Engelhardt, whose indispensable blog TomDispatch.com has long been one of my inspirations, will take it from here with two essays that should put to rest any further doubts you may have about the abject failure of Bush's policy in Iraq and the moral depravity of his apologists. Read Engelhardt's "Playing the Numbers Game With Death in Iraq", then (most importantly) "Truths of a Lost War". Afterwards, when you re-read SCC's "analysis" in the Whine, Whine, Whine post--try not to laugh.