04/20/07
Perhaps Americans have become numbed to what's happening in Iraq. Certainly the media has been more focused this week on the massacre at Virginia Tech and Alberto Gonzales's testimony in Washington. But under our noses, big and bad things are happening in Iraq — and not just nearly 300 people slaughtered in a single day on Wednesday.
Consider, for instance, the Baghdad Wall:
A U.S. military brigade is constructing a 3-mile-long concrete wall to cut off one of the capital's most restive Sunni Arab districts from the Shiite Muslim neighborhoods that surround it, raising concern about the further Balkanization of Iraq's most populous and violent city.
U.S. commanders in northern Baghdad said the 12-foot-high barrier would make it more difficult for suicide bombers to strike and for death squads and militia fighters from sectarian factions to attack one another and then slip back to their home turf. Construction began April 10 and is expected to be completed by the end of the month.
Meanwhile, this news makes a mockery of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's declaration that Iraqi forces will be in charge of security in all 18 of Iraq's provinces by year's end:
Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.
But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.
For — what, two or three years now? — "Iraqification" has been the stated aim of U.S. policy in Iraq ("We'll stand down when they stand up"), to lull the American public into a sense that even if things were wrong at the moment, they'd turn out OK in the end. After it was plainly evident that "Vietnamization" was no longer working, the policy became one of blaming neighbor countries and bombing them to smithereens. Might history repeat itself? Only this time as farce?
Dave Gonigam
Treading a fine line between contrarian thinking and conspiracy theory, Dave Gonigam explores the nexus of finance, politics, and the media for Agora Financial's 5 Minute Forecast. He joined kindred spirits at Agora Financial in 2007 after a 20-year career as an Emmy award-winning writer, producer, and manager in local TV newsrooms nationwide.
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All REALLY SICK Dave and ALL emanating from the chosen figure-head who, as a boy, loved to blow up frogs … but then grew even further down to set a record (as the Governor of Texas) for having people executed.
So why expect anything different from this president? Just a figurehead/symbol of a world gone generally either fully psychotic, or at least extensively sociopathic, e.g. with most people being really quite dissociated and/or having at least borderline personality disorders … yep including me, but at least I have bothered study psychology, whereas most people do not have a clue and generally tend to believe that they are “normal”.
I bet my bottom dollar that GWB imagines that he is “normal”, though he is not – not in any respect, e.g. most kids do not find it fun to blow up frogs, very few kids find themselves born into very rich families (who can bail them out of anything), but he is far from alone in having had a father and mother who took no interest in him.
Whatever!
It is all rather too late now … like it was when a few Romans woke up to the fact that their movers and shakers were basically mad.
Is “borderline personality disorders” an unintentional pun?
I’ll bite Joseph.
I’ve thought about your “unintentional pun” for a day or so, but what I wrote was and remains intentional, if within the bounds of what I subscribe to as productive means to understand the psyche.
Obviously we cannot both have read, studied, etc. the same concepts in the groping and still very nascent attempted-science of psychology, even after some two millenia since Socrates enunciated “Know Thyself” and “The unexamined life is not worth living.”.
I have sorta time-travelled over the centuries and can see why there is a connect between Socrates, Descartes and such as Jung.
Along the way – especially via personal experience – I have picked up on the concept of “borderline personality disorders”, i.e. people who teeter on the brink of full-blown psychosis, but who generally function well, or even very well.
I have seen it happen many times.
I suppose this is hardly the place to really go into this, but I am intrigued by you thinking that what I wrote was an unintended pun.
I will learn something if you explain why you thought it was.
The ‘borderline disorder’ to which I was referring is the “Baghdad Barrier” – physical. Included could be the abstract border between Iran and Iraq. Now since, President Bush has us so concerned about homeland security, we might as well add the confines of legal immigration. There are quite a lot of disordered personalities operating on the fringes of all three.
Gotcha Joseph.
I’m usually pretty quick on the uptake, but I’ve been too closely involved with disordered people – and too damaged, by some – to have immediately seen the unintended pun.
Thanks for explaining.