Needlenose

Oh dear.

Conspiracy-Theory Buddy alerts me to the bizarre utterances of Repug CongrAssclown Trent Franks of Arizona who decided to spend his ‘bailout bill’ discussion time ranting about the need to preemptively attack Iran.  What kind of fish-eyed fools elect an assclown like this?  Well Representative Assclown is up for reelection this year, make sure to give some money to his opponent Thrasher, who hopefully will give him a thrashing.  And before you whine about safe seat, etc., just remember – they said all that about Pombo too and we kicked his out of his comfy seat!

Since the run-up to the attack on Iraq in ’03, numerous liberal wags have been depicting Shrubya as a lil’ Napoleon. But if you think about it, Napoleon was actually pretty successful, for a time. And wasn’t he really smart? Focused on improving the lot of his countrymen whilst building up his empire?

An historic figure more analogous to President Arbusto is King Philip II of Spain – you know, the guy who launched the massive Armada (30,000 men on 130 warships) against England in a sort of quasi holy war – and got his ass kicked ( about 1/2 the ships destroyed and 2/3rds of the men killed).

In The Voyage of the Armada, David Howarth paints a pretty unflattering description of Shrubya’s soul-mate. King Philip was extremely slow to learn, either from his own experience, or from the much more brilliant men in court. The mixture of mediocrity and power made him immovably self-righteous and obstinate.” Sound familiar?

Philip “loved his children” and “at least one of his wives” but “outside of this little circle he was seldom moved to pity.” Shrubya seems equally devoted to both his spawn and Laura, but if you recall his time as Governor of Texas, he was a man that could execute felons (guilty or otherwise) with impunity.

Even their conception of the Almighty seems similar:

The God that Philip served was all-powerful, all-knowing and unforgiving. He could and did take part by miracles in men’s affairs…He demanded worship absolutely exactly in the forms the Catholic Church proclaimed and not in any other. He also demanded the most cruel and terrible punishments men could devise for anyone who deviated in the least degree.

Shrubya also seems to follow Philip’s economic policies:

Also (the Empire) was bankrupt…Philip had mortgaged all the empire’s revenues for years ahead, mainly to foreign bankers…Trite though it might seem, the designs of God cost an awful lot of money.

Howarth could easy be talking about Shrubya when he sums up Philip’s character:

Reading Philip’s letters in the twentieth century and judging him by twentieth century standards…one has to say he was bigoted, dogmatic, self-righteous, illogical, ruthless and hopelessly confused; but also, he was appallingly sincere.

The causus belli for the Armada invasion seems as confused as that for the invasion of Iraq. It morphed variously from restoring the Catholic faith to an England ruled by Protestant heretics to guaranteeing the rights of Catholics to practice their faith freely, to putting Philip or one of his kids on the English throne.

One eery parallel to the run-up to both wars is the use of both misLeaders on wacky spy masters who used disreputable and biased expatriate sources (English Catholics who were exiled or had to flee from England after being suspected of treason) to build his case for the war and for the reception the Spaniards would receive on the part of the grateful English:

Perhaps no monarch about to launch a war was ever so mistaken about his enemies. Philip was led to believe the Protestants of England were a small minority of oppressors; that the majority were Catholics who would gladly rise in revolt when they sighted his armada; and finally, the most tragic misapprehension of all, that England would welcome him as king or his daughter as queen.

Kinda reminds you of Swopa’s old favorite Iraqi subject, Chalabi, huh?

Another odd parallel is the use of deceitful, no-bid contracts. Some time after setting off, the leader of the Armada discovered that “their huge supplies of food were going rotten” and that the water barrels were “green and slimy and undrinkable” – most likely due to either shoddy workmanship or out-right swindling on the part of the suppliers. Worse, in the decisive sea battle off Calais, the English cannon turned the Spanish ships into swiss cheese, but the English ships emerged virtuously unscathed. No, it wasn’t a miracle – a modern study of the cannonballs used by the Spanish reveals substandard craftsmanship resulting in a “very brittle” shot that “broke into small bits either at the shock of firing or the shock of impact on an enemy hull.” I wonder who was the Halliburton of 1588?

Perhaps the most amazing similarity about Philip and Shrubya is their shared inability to admit to failure, and unwillingness to change policies in defiance of reality. In Philip’s case, you might think that the loss of half his fleet and the deaths of 20,000 men, especially in the face of not a loss of a single English vessel and minimal English casualties might convince him that sending an Armada against England was a really bad idea. But you’d be wrong:

…he dispatched three more (armadas) before he died in 1598. The first of them, for an invasion of Ireland, sailed at his insistence and against the advice of his admirals at the worst possible time of year, November 1596. It was wrecked by a storm before it left Spanish waters. The next, in 1597, was to land Spanish troops at Falmouth and occupy Cornwall. It came nearest of all to success, but was beaten back by a northerly gale a few miles short of its landing.

Afghanistan…Iraq…Iran? Two peas in a pod…

I’ve touched on this topic in recent blogs, but I thought it would be useful to summarize why this war is unwinnable. Although the original causus belli changed weekly and our win conditions were never really spelled out, we can infer the final objectives based upon White House pronouncements and consider their attainability.

Regime Change/Iraqi Freedom
Bush demanded loudly and repeatedly for the removal of Saddam and the Baath party; in fact, this was his final ultimatum before the invasion. Now that Saddam and his cronies are nowhere to be found, and U.S. troops are occupying his palaces, we’ve won, right?

Well the problem lies in the ‘change’ part of the objective. Dubya promised a rapid handover to a democratically elected Iraqi goverment within 6 months (conveniently timed around the November elections!), with a total occupation of 18 months. Now the White House is grudgingly admitting that setting up an alternative regime might take a bit longer than 6 months, presumably pushing out the 18-month milestone as well.

But questions of timing aside, the real devil lies in the details – what constitutes an acceptable alternative regime? Dubya has promised to “ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another,” a caveat later expanded by Rumsfeld to preclude either a pro-Iranian regime or an Iran-style Islamic Republic. The difficulty is that the overwhelming majority of the country are deeply religious Shiites (who are already consolidating their power without U.S. help) who have made it abundantly clear in huge, angry focus groups (Bush-speak for demonstrations) that they want an Islamic brand of democracy and will reject any goverment supported by the U.S. This sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Territorial Integrity
Last year, Bush committed to preserving Iraq’s territorial integrity, in an attempt to get buy-in from the U.N. and to avoid antagonizing fellow NATO member Turkey. Sure to disrupt Bush’s plans is the fact that the Kurds have other ideas. With little opposition from the few U.S. troops in the region, the heavily armed and organized Kurds have been ethnically cleansing Arabs from Kurdish territory. They will probably content themselves with pay-back reprisals against Arabs and Turks until such time as a new target presents itself in the form of troops from a new, Arab-dominated regime intent on asserting authority in the region. At that point, they’ll stop paying lip-service to ‘regional autonomy’ and will launch a full-blown civil war against Baghdad and any occupation troops that might stand in their way.

Disarming Saddam/Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
The rapid breakup of the Iraqi army has left vast amounts of guerilla war-ready arms and munitions in the hands of the populace, including suspected Baath loyalists. As far as the supposed WMD, what possible motive could Saddam have for destroying them on the eve of a U.S. invasion as Dubya recently asserted (he must think Americans are really dumb)? best case, they never existed outside the delusions of the wrong-wing, worst case, they’re now in the hands of terrorists. Smooth move, Dubya!

Winning the ‘Hearts & Minds’ of the Iraqi people & the ‘Arab Street’
First impressions are hard to shake. How seriously can they take American rhetoric after the abject failure of Jay Garner and the occupation to date? My bet is Humpty Dumpty has already had his great fall, and there’s nothing Viceroy Bremer can do to ‘put him back together again.’

Striking a Blow Against Terrorism
Give me a break!

Conclusion?