First Drafts

I looked at what I wrote last night and I would like to change it in a hundred ways. Most of what I slap up on the screen here is like that. I’ll start in the middle, cast about for where that came from, eventually get back to the beginning, and then look for some glib way to tie everything together and end the post.  For example…

The day before yesterday we celebrated the fourth anniversary of George Bush’s stunning victory in Iraq. “Mission accomplished,” he said. While some of us thought him less than sincere, less than accurate, everyone was a little relieved that he’d shared his delusion. This wasn’t a quagmire like Vietnam, a rat hole we were stuffing with million dollar notes. This was a brief excursion into glorious imperialism. The global strategists among us, the boys down at the local bar who would as soon talk politics as baseball, agreed that it was important to have a place to build forward bases now that the Saudis were throwing us out. Iraq looked like a good place from which to project power into those underdeveloped oil fields of West Asia. So it was nice that the mission was accomplished and we could send in the construction crews to build us a couple of permanent bases before the Saudis threw us out of their kingdom once and for all.

But of course the mission wasn’t accomplished, unless the mission was to turn Iraq into a land torn by sectarian strife and to bring US national power to bear on the problem of US corporations’ lust for Iraq’s petroleum resources. It’s reasonable that Bush would veto the funding bill, because while it had enough loopholes to be meaningless, it did at least open the vision of Congressional authority and the possibility of setting goals that can actually be accomplished.

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