It seems as if the basic neocon doctrine towards Iran is that it’s foolish to try anything more complex than bombing them, lest we get bombed first. Of course, if we bomb them, then they won’t bomb us back, because they’ll be double scared of bombing. But if we don’t bomb them, they’re going to bomb us, which will of course result in them being bombed, but somehow it’s a qualitatively different sort of bombing that they aren’t actually afraid of.
Perhaps the perfect rumination on this is from Jeffrey Goldberg’s May interview with John McCain:
JG: What do you think motivates Iran?
JM: Hatred. I don’t try to divine people’s motives. I look at their actions and what they say. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the state of their emotions. I do know what their nation’s stated purpose is, I do know they continue in the development of nuclear weapons, and I know that they continue to support terrorists who are bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. You’ll have to ask someone who engages in this psycho stuff to talk about their emotions.
There is no reason the potential leader of the free world should be saying anything this fucking stupid without benefit of severe intoxication. This is not, in fact, an answer that an adult gives to a serious question concerning the lives of thousands of people, but rambling designed to communicate posture and dominance. If your view of nations is something like a wildlife documentary on Animal Planet, I recommend you vote McCain Leader of the Pack. If he starts humping you to reassert himself, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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Goddammit.
Zimbabwe’s opposition leader says he is pulling out of Friday’s runoff election against President Robert Mugabe.
Morgan Tsvangirai says this is because of mounting violence and intimidation against the opposition during the campaign.
Tsvangirai announced his decision during a news conference in Zimbabwe’s capital on Sunday after thousands of ruling party militants blockaded the site of the opposition’s main campaign rally.
The opposition says that police in full riot gear and soldiers have taken over the site of the rally.
Zimbabwe updates:
Mugabe’s government continues to arbitrarily detain opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai two weeks before scheduled elections. His deputy, Tendai Biti, is being detained on charges of treason. In a gross fit of irony, Biti is being accused of tampering with elections:
Senior officials in Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, in power for 28 years, have accused Mr. Biti, a lawyer who is often the opposition’s public face, of violating the law by announcing the outcome of the initial round of voting in March before the official results were released.
They also alleged that Mr. Biti wrote a paper shortly before the disputed March election laying out the opposition’s strategy for a transition to power and efforts to bribe poll officers “so that they exploit any available opportunity to overstate our votes,” according to a quotation from the document published in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, in April.
The opposition has dismissed the document as a forgery. Others have also found it implausible that Mr. Biti, a successful lawyer, would have written something so blatantly self-incriminating.
In case you were under the mistaken impression that Mugabe’s regime was merely harming the leaders of the opposition party, don’t you worry - they’re also stealing aid from children.
The aid truck driver had pulled over for the night, worried it was too late to be on the roads with his load - 20 tons of food donated by the United States for the children of Zimbabwe.
That’s when the governor of an eastern Zimbabwe province ordered the wheat and beans unloaded and distributed at a political rally being held nearby for President Robert Mugabe, the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, said Thursday.
There is one certain thing arising from this oppression - no matter what happens in the election two weeks from now, the legitimate will of the people of Zimbabwe will not be the victory that Mugabe will claim.
You know what? We were proved fucking right. That’s what happened. People who disagreed with us were saying, ‘There they go again.’ But we were proved fucking right.
The thing that always bothered me about the overall idea of being lied to repeatedly by the leader of the free world in a manner so blatant that only the American press corps could overlook it was that they never really tried to obscure the lie in a way that actually reflected the magnitude of the enterprise.
Whenever a private company tries to repair or promote their image, they’ll generally do a variety of charitable activities (a 5K here, a day of litter pickup there) that create the impression, if not the reality, of them being a vitally beneficial part of the community. It can be better from a PR perspective to have fifty kids receiving fifty small scholarships than it is to have five kids receiving five large scholarships, because the generosity, although exactly the same financially, is spread out among many more people who in turn spread word of your generosity to an exponential number of others.
With Iraq, the Bush Administration decided that they’d give one kid one giant fucking scholarship, and that kid was going to be a Nobel winner when they were done with him. If you questioned them, it was because you didn’t believe the kid was smart enough to tie his own shoes, let alone finish college. If you pointed out that the scholarship was only good at Crazy Pete’s House of Mufflers and Molecular Biology, it was because you were against alternative forms of education. And if you dared - dared - point out that the case for giving the kid the scholarship was based on forged paperwork and a plagiarized essay, it was probably because you were secretly a pedophile who was sad the kid was going to be spirited away from the local NAMBLA meeting.
From the time we went into Iraq, and seeing the resulting mess five years later, I’ve always wondered - how much better would it have been had the Bush administration had made at least some token serious steps towards promoting freedom and democracy anywhere else, even if it was only as a mask for the Iraq debacle?
What comes chiefly to mind is Zimbabwe - a country that, for years, has been in a hideous downward spiral of blatant oppression. It’s gotten so bad that Mugabe simply can’t (and won’t) hide it anymore:
The American ambassador to Zimbabwe, James D. McGee, said the police tried to run the American diplomats off the road during a six-mile chase, then slashed the tires of their SUV at a roadblock. War veterans, the often-violent agents of the state, subsequently threatened to set fire to their vehicle with them inside, and tried to bash in the windows with their rifle butts. A Zimbabwean driver who brought the embassy’s security officer to the scene was hauled from the car, beaten and tossed in a ditch, Mr. McGee said.
This isn’t to say that a military invasion of Zimbabwe should have been tossed on the pile - exactly the opposite. But it is to say that the gross abuse of the world’s trust might have been ameliorated, ever so slightly, had Bush actually attempted to obscure the massive fuckup he was about to embark on by engaging other spots around the world where the direct intervention of an American president with what was, at that time, large-scale support and sympathy could have truly done some good.
Instead, he wasted that opportunity. And now, it just gets worse.
The list of targets for state-sponsored intimidation in Zimbabwe just keeps getting longer. First and foremost, it includes opposition officials and supporters, but also takes aim at civic leaders, trade unionists, election monitors, journalists, human rights lawyers, teachers, churchgoers — and now aid workers and diplomats.
[...]
Opposition officials have voiced deep disappointment that regional intervention to halt the violence before the runoff, now only three weeks away, has been weak and tardy.
