Bitterness is like acid...
And there's a growing resemblance.
Posted on 04/08/2003 7:52:29 PM PDT by Pokey78
WASHINGTON — There is an unforgettable scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" when an agonized Lawrence resists as a British commander in Cairo presses him to return to the desert to lead the Arabs revolting against the Ottoman Turks.
Lawrence: "I killed two people. One was yesterday. He was just a boy, and I led him into quicksand. The other was . . . well . . . before Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something about it that I didn't like."
General Allenby: "That's to be expected."
Lawrence: "No, something else."
General Allenby: "Well, then let it be a lesson."
Lawrence: "No . . . something else."
General Allenby: "What then?"
Lawrence: "I enjoyed it."
We were always going to win the war with Iraq. We were always going to get to some triumphant moment, like the great one on Fox at 1:30 a.m. Eastern time on Monday morning, when two G.I.'s from Georgia held up a University of Georgia bulldog flag they intended to drape over Saddam's presidential palace in Baghdad, and others mischievously headed upstairs to try out Saddam's gold fixtures in the master bathroom.
The big question about the war was, How much blood could Americans bear?
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were determined to lead America out of its post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu queasiness with force and casualties, to change the culture to accept war as a more natural part of a superpower's role in the world.
Their strategy might be described as Black Hawk Up.
Mr. Cheney's war guru, Victor Davis Hanson, writes in his book "An Autumn of War" that war can be good, and that sometimes nations are better off using devastation than suasion. Mr. Davis cites Sherman's march through Georgia, the 19th century's great instance of shock and awe, as a positive role model.
Polls and interviews show that in their goal of making Americans less rattled by battle, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney have succeeded: most Americans are showing a stoic attitude about the dead and the wounded so far.
(Perhaps the American tolerance for pain is owed to the fact that much of the pain is not shown on television, embeddedness notwithstanding.)
Wolfowitz of Arabia and the other administration hawks are thrilled with U.S. hawkishness.
When Mr. Wolfowitz was on "Meet the Press" on Sunday his aides sat in the green room watching the monitor and high-fiving their boss's performance.
As American forces made their first armored thrusts into Baghdad, visions of a JDAM strike on Damascus danced in the hawks' heads.
James Woolsey, a Wolfie pal and a prospective administrator in occupied Iraq, had bluntly told U.C.L.A. students last week that to reshape the Middle East, the U.S. would have to spend years and maybe decades waging World War IV. (He counted the cold war as World War III.)
He identified America's enemies as the Islamist Shia who run Iran, the Iranian-supported Hezbollah, the fascist Baathists in Iraq and Syria, and the Islamist Sunni who run Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups.
Mr. Wolfowitz, however, played the diplomat on Sunday, gliding past Tim Russert's probing on whether the neo-cons' dreams of other campaigns in Syria, Iran and North Korea would come true. Pressed, he said, "There's got to be change in Syria as well."
The Times's David Sanger reported that when a Bush aide stepped into the Oval Office to tell the president recently that his hard-boiled defense secretary had been shaking a fist at Syria, Mr. Bush smiled and said one word: "Good."
The administration already sounds as triumphalist as Lawrence at his giddiest.
The success of this war should not leave us infatuated with war. Americans' tolerance for these casualties should not be mistaken for a willingness to absorb endless American sacrifice on endless battlefields.
Victory in Iraq will be a truly historic event, but it will be exceedingly weird and dangerous if this administration treats it as an overture.
There remains the unfinished business of Osama bin Laden. But the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom should not mark the beginning of Operation Eternal War.
This (if true) is the best part of the piece. Let us hope the word is backed by force when our job in Iraq is done.
You might think so, I don't.
Yet one more way women are up on men.
So why do all her columns sound like "Play Misty for Me"??
...and I was old when I saw it.
Today's satirical Onion headline reads: "Bush Subconsciously Sizes Up Spain for Invasion."
I think it's telling that Dowd is reduced to actually quoting The Onion (!) in the New York Times. More to the point, since all her (and her colleagues') dire predictions about Bush and this war have been emphatically contradicted by actual events, she now has to chide the administration about things she thinks will occur. It's her version of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". She can't bring herself to "join 'em", so she is now going with "if you can't beat 'em, criticize something they haven't done yet, and set the bar so high they will never be able to succeed again."
If you check out Tom Friedman's column on the same website, you will see the same phenomenon. It basically says that, while we have won a stunning victory, and liberated Iraq from unbearable misery, there are still some hungry people there -- we better fix that quick or we will have failed.
I suppose there is some satisfaction in having even their grudging, or more accurately, hidden, acknowledgement of our success. It is still frustrating to see the utter hypocrisy in their stances now as compared to when Billy-boy was at the helm.
This is what I love about the zany writings of this woman. She writes as though she has an inside scoop on what Rumsfeld and Cheney think - as if she had interviewed them or gone to a dinner party. She has no such sources, she is not connected. She is barren.
The delicious fact is that she makes up this tripe in her mind - I'll call it Dowdland. In Dowdland, you always have the trendy or "nuanced" answers because you don't need to apply critical thinking to your premises. "Proofs of logic" become "poofs of logic". In Dowdland, Cheney and Rumsfeld can say and think anythying you want them to. Her columns become mainly what makes her feel good about the world and society instead of having a shred of rationality in regards to the issues of the day. In Dowdland, feelings really do triumph over facts, logic and reasoning.
Their strategy might be described as Black Hawk Up.
This is just a disgusting statement, not worthy of a more detailed response.
And so it goes in Dowdland.
You are describing Dowdland...
Bitterness is like acid...
And there's a growing resemblance.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. (Not that I see what's so "pure" about her.)
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