Quagmire on the Ground ... Grounded in the Mind

It seems to me that these Neocons have taken terrorism, which was a manageable threat and by ignoring Clinton's warnings, escalated it through hyping nonexistent threats, through denial of existing ones, and through bad policy even more badly implemented, raised it to heights unimagined before they came to office.

In the Arab world, before the 'Project for a New American Century', Islamists were clearly a threat, but minor and sidelined in terms of broad public support. With Bush's mono-dimensional PNAC foreign policy, Islamists have been able to lever the huge, heavy, colossal power of the west to do its bidding.

The Islamist goal of a Pan Arab theocracy required the destablization of monarchies and secular regimes in the Middle East, for their project to have any possibility. Since they themselves lacked sufficient direct influence to bring this change about, they needed something or someone else to help them do it ... Enter an adolescent heroic archetype, a 1940's cinematic version of a western sheriff in the form of Jr. ... apparently too irresistible an image for the MSM.

However, out maneuvering the USA, Islamists have not only been able to create a destablized environment they can exploit, but also have been able to provide a 'good/evil' story line, where even moderate Muslims who do not support a radical Islamist theocracy, can still see the west as wrong, if not evil ... and to add ironically to tragedy, inflicted this storyline on the land where advertising is king. For the Islamists, it is indeed "Mission Accomplished"

One of the many justifications for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and for staying now, is the prevention of destablization and greater radical Islamist influence in Iraq and the Middle East. However, these justifications are now even more valid AFTER Neoconservative 'PRE-ventative' intervention. This regressive slide into a debacle, has concurrently now exhausted military options, as well as US public and world trust.

'Situations' such as this, often get the mind thinking in 'What if?' terms.

'What if Afghanistan had been effectively provided actual governance and economic development, before the Taliban had 4 plus year to re-establish themselves?' What if initial efforts had begun to altered the kind of poverty and exclusion from politics, that breeds the rational for radicalism?' 'What if', this 'o-mission' had been noticed while reconstruction was still possible?

But was exclusive Coalition 'Reconstruction' (grimy enticement and punishment offered up from the 'morality' of the 'Values Guyz') ever really an option in the Neocon tool box ... except as a means to obscene corporate profits?

Aside from the facts 'on the ground' that support this question, isn't it the neocon 'compassionate social mind' that wants to punish the disadvantaged, to 'awaken' them to their own responsibility, for the conditions of their poverty at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid? It is the sort of mind that now demands that Iraqis take responsibility for the chaos unleashed by the USA when it removed an existing social order (however troubled it was), and not replaced it with another (sans any US accountability for doing so).

'What if' , BEFORE incompetent implementation of negligently created policy, Bush had listened to Clinton and eliminated Bin Laden?

'What if' the MSM had dealt investigatively with Bush's 9/11, or with forces in the Middle East, as opposed to providing infotainment? 'What if' the MSM had provided actual facts around the Bush foreign policy, in other than talking points and public opinion polls that measure their dissemination? Would we now be in this position where we can NOT leave Iraq without creating catastrophe, while we can NOT stay in Iraq without furthering chaos?

To complicate matters, if Juan Cole is correct, we now have the Baker-Hamilton Commission attempting to create a realignment of the Administration's Middle East policy, with a return to a Bush Sr. orientation towards the Sunnis (Saudi Arabia in particular, and which would now also include Syria).

Whether that is so or not, it appears Jr. is attempting to prop up the Iranian aligned Shia government of Maliki, while being unwilling to accept Iranian involvement or victory as a consequence ... Is this even rational?

If NOT, is the MSM contributing to the hopelessness, from the apparent lack of 'viable options', by treating Jr's 'rhetorical re-tooling' of his 'stay the course' to 'success', as rational?

It seems clear at least up until now in the MSM, almost nobody in positions of effective responsibility are willing to make real contextual sense of the Administration's policy and actions. Up until now, everything was formed in faux values, with faux story lines. For example, the MSM ignored the interchangability of justifications for War, replacing one another virtually without any real accounting, and simply keying in on the 'new campaign' slogans ... Truly Orwellian!

But at some point, public pressure however it is constructed and however it is informed, will come into play in Iraq - just as the lack therefore allowed certain political options to be viable for the Neocons, going in to Iraq. It will again bring its influence to bear and allow another limited range of options, Bush's stubbornness included.

In part, this pressure will emerge from its own Green Zone like, MSM experience. It will be limited by a MSM intellectual environment, already polluted by its refusal to step outside the 'protective' walls of rhetorical talking points, to provided sufficient investigative facticity to allow for much more than the odd incursion into informed debate, from the periphery.

We also see the Democratic Party, victorious after running a no platform campaign, struggling to come to grips with its 'NOT (R)' mandate, attempting to create policy and direction out of the ambivalence it nurtured in the mid terms.

Is this a public 'informed' by a MSM, as well as a Party, with insufficient 'command' of facticity to extricate themselves from the simplicity of rhetorical talking points? Are they too mired in this (and therefore their own), intellectual quagmire ... too stranded in faux Values, addressing faux events, and so only capable of seeing and supporting faux options?

If so ... one wonders where the events in the Middle East will stagger too next, if this is where public pressure and alternative policy emerge from ...

Snerd