We've Got Them Right Where We Want Them

There are certain pundits who are inclined to cut Bush a lot of slack. For instance, these folks say that if it turns out that Iraq really had no "weapons of mass destruction," – hey, well, we knew all along that that wasn't the real reason we had to pursue "regime change." No, it was to liberate the Iraqi people. And should it turn out that the Iraqi people don't actually feel they have been liberated? Well, then we went to war because it was in our strategic interests to eliminate Hussein's government.

But Andrew Sullivan recently has made a strong, perhaps unbeatable, claim to the title of "Chief Bush Slack Cutter." Other administration apologists have generally regarded the ongoing guerilla warfare in Iraq as an unfortunate consequence of a necessary war. Some have blamed the US for bungling the "post-war" administration of the country, dampening the initial enthusiasm of the Iraqi people at being freed of Hussein. Others have attributed the problems to the fact that many of Hussein's troops did not directly confront the US during the "war phase" of the war, allowing them to slip away and fight a guerilla war.

Sullivan puts such wankers paltry faith in George Bush to shame. He has discerned the real reason for the ongoing turmoil in Iraq: It's all a part of the administration's plan to win the war on terror! As he wrote recently in his blog:

This is an interesting strategy, sort of like why I wander around in the woods on humid days wearing no bug repellent: It draws those darned mosquitoes out, where I can tackle them in the open.

But what of the many Iraqis who would not have considered taking up arms against the US, except for the increasingly brutal occupation of their country by a foreign army, the lack of water and electricity, the 2:00 AM, warrantless raids on their homes to confiscate weapons that are legally theirs, and their innocent relatives accidentally killed by US troops? That seems a bit more like breeding mosquitoes rather than simply drawing existing ones into the open.

Well, quite clearly, such people were all potential terrorists! After all, the fact that they could be prompted to attack US troops demonstrates this all by itself, doesn't it? So, by our occupation of Iraq, we not only "draw terrorists out of the woodwork," we also are able to find out who the potential terrorists are, and get them out of that darned woodwork as well. And if the reservoir of potential terrorists turns out to be a good portion of the population of Iraq? Well, it's better to find out now, isn't it?

Now, some of you might still resist the force of Mr. Sullivan's logic. "Wait a second," you ask, "if this was the administration's strategy, shouldn't it have at least told us? What about those statements that we weren't going to occupy Iraq, just liberate it? And wouldn't it have been decent to have informed the troops, who had thought they'd be back with their family in a couple of months, that actually they would be spending years serving as terrorist bait?" After all, if they are going to be human "flypaper," as Sullivan calls them in another blog entry, they might have wanted to know what they were getting into.

Clearly, you whiners have not yet achieved Sullivan's deep appreciation of the strategic brilliance of President Bush. If you're going to trick terrorists into coming to pick off a few of our troops every day, you can't tell them it's a trap now, can you? If they knew they were being duped into plugging US soldiers in the neck with a bullet, they'd never fall for it.

Bush has this all under control. If a dirty nuke, made from the material stolen, in the wake of the war, from Iraq's unguarded nuclear facilities, goes off in Los Angeles or Boston, well, that draws a few more terrorists out of the woodwork, doesn't it? Plus, it tricks them into using up their radioactive material! The residents who die should be satisfied in knowing that it was all part of the plan.

As Sullivan says, "Under this president, we mean to win." So, if the administration is feeding us a line of crap, our job is to pipe down and swallow it. After all, you aren't some sort of traitor, are you?