Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Ceasefire in Iraq now

Zeyad at healing iraq has pictures of what is in the garbage in Baghdad. Take a look.

The most important thing that can happen in Iraq is a ceasefire - because the violence will have no military end. The enemy will never be thoroughly killed. And of course, we don't even know who the enemy is, although if I was Iraqi, I would suspect that foreign power that invaded four years ago. An American escalation simply tests the fungibility of violence. The main thing is to stop it.

We are headlining this post with the traditional lefty imperative, such as you shout during demonstrations, thus demonstrating to all and sundry the disconnect between the infinite resources of language and the powerlessness of the demonstrator. Everybody is happy about that. At the moment, however, the tantrum has become the standard verbal form for ... well, peace love and understanding. That rather condemns the current state of the civilization, don't it?

The current state of civilization...

Let's spend no more money ripping apart thousands of Iraqi bodies, or continuing to promote the structure that helps Iraqi groups to rip each other apart. How is that for a long slogan?

5 comments:

Dick Durata said...

Run away.
That's my slogan.

Roger Gathmann said...

I'd sign up for your slogan, Mr. Durata. My problem, however, is that if we aren't running away, what shall we do then? Which is why, in the bloody interim, I'm for a ceasefire.

Arkady said...

Roger, the tender-hearted, baffled Fausts, who simply didn't understand -- no, seriously, they didn't understand -- the terms of the contract offered by Mr. Satan (who really ought to at least consider a different spelling), can't abide the thought of not actively doing something, anything at all, even if it makes things worse. And while I agree that a ceasefire is necessary, they're going to have to get used to the idea that the disingenuous schtick has gotten old, especially those among them who enjoy diddling themselves with the cruise missiles of compassion.

As nothing remotely reasonable is going to be considered, and the war cretins -- all of them -- persist in confabulation, I think lazy attrition is the best way. Exhaust them. Short, sharp slogans seem to set them off the best.

Roger Gathmann said...

Mr. Scruggs, man, what can I say? You seem to be ever so slightly more pessimistic lately - like you make Gloomy Gus seem like one of the extras in Fame!

All I can say - returning to our old Life of Brian thread - is "you've got to learn how to whistle."

Arkady said...

Roger, do you remember that poll from a few months back, which reported that the number of people who believed Iraq had massive weapons of mass destruction had actually increased -- after that number had declined steadily since the start of the war? Now there's another miserable poll, which reports that the wingnuts say they believe increasing the size of the fiasco will make it better.

It seems to me that those responses are tactical, not necessarily heartfelt, and based less on being gulled than on detestation of Democrats, whom they incorrectly identify as being adamantly anti-war, rather than ditheringly pro-war; and those who are opposed, really only opposed to a war wingnuts want. In other words, public opinion by and large has no correspondence with any actual events, but is the product of calculations based on talking points, which themselves are based on a perceived potential advantage for the home team.

Not to get all PoMo, but for all practical purposes, public opinion has no existence. There's no feedback from consumer sentiment and stupid rivalries at a ball game. Even if the batshit elite wanted to do something positive, there doesn't appear to be any way for them to find out what that might be.

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