@Uncle – you are a satirist – right?

Posted by: b | Apr 26 2007 18:37 utc | 3

It’s obvious that the Bush Administration has been modifying GE advertising slogans as the basis of its Iraqi strategy. Consider the following:
“We bring good things to life”
Analysis: Dropped by Bush Administration in 2005 when voters didn’t care about Iraqi schools being rebuilt and painted.
“Progress is our most important product”
Analysis: In spite of repetition, slogan is not playing well with voters.
What’s left?
“Shall the man work – or shall you? …
Back of every great step in women’s progress from a drudge to a free citizen has been some labor-saving invention.” [1924 slogan]
Pretty interesting, eh?

Posted by: infoshaman | Apr 26 2007 20:03 utc | 5

I meant to write counter-in-surge-ency, but then, it’s late here.
In the most recent issue of Harper’s Magazine, Lewis H. Lapham writes about the legacy of historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and quotes the historian, whose confidence in the future of an erudite study and writing about history, here in America, was diminished by doubts toward the end of his life.

“For proofs of what can happen to a nation that loses touch with its history–“deprived of memory,” “disoriented and lost”–Arthur could look to any morning’s news report from Baghdad.. The Bush Administration’s repetition of the mistake made thirty years ago in Vietnam he thought “unforgivable”, but as an historian he knew it to be in keeping with the sensibility shaped by film and electronic media and matched to the comprehension of children–an attitude of mind formed in the floating world of timeless fantasy, impatient and easily bored, less at ease with a stable story line than with the flow of brand name images in which nothing necessarily follows from anything else”…
“narrative becomes montage, and our ministers of state forget why and how men go to war.”
{snip}
“In the House of Representatives the politicians stage a “debate” about the “war” in Iraq deserving the continued “support of the troops,” which might be welcome news for all concerned (the American soldiers in Anbar province as well as the mullahs of Najaf) if the operative words referred to anything other than the same sort of virtual reality sold under the labels of “war on terror.” More often than not the “debate” takes the form of prerecorded public-service announcements, similar in design to a beer commercial, delivered by each member in turn to an empty chamber and a C-Span television camera. Like the Israeli containment of the Palestinians, the “war” in Iraq is the suppression by force of restive civilians, police work as opposed to the maneuvering of armies. The notion of continuing “support of the troops” implies a level of prior or current support that didn’t and doesn’t exist.”

The extreme program of the Bush Administration over the past six years seems to be centered in the breakdown of any relationship of cause and effect. Nothing expressly follows from anything else. Progress is advocated. Progress is sold. Reverses are always to be expected and only quitters are discouraged. And if progress proves futile and illusory, the War Party will only suggest a new strategy and a new opportunity to measure the piecemeal destruction of the occupied country.
This is the Bush Administration’s default plan: endless war with rumors of progress.

Posted by: Copeland | Apr 27 2007 6:24 utc | 7

Saudis arrest 172 in ‘terror raid’

Mansour al-Turki, an interior ministry spokesman, said: “It is obvious that the deviant group is still trying to revive its criminal activities in the kingdom.”
He said that a total of 172 suspects from seven cells have been arrested, mostly Saudis but including some foreigners, who had trained abroad.
“They are linked to foreign elements and had benefited from restive areas to recruit, plan and train (for attacks),” al-Turki said, in an apparent reference to Iraq, where up to 3,000 Saudi fighters are believed to have joined Iraqis in their fight against US-backed Iraqi government forces.
Television pictures showed police digging in desert areas and searching buildings, seizing weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, computers and bundles of money.

Can these be the some of “Sunni extremists” funded by the Saudis in Iraq, turning back to strike at the “homeland”?

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Apr 28 2007 1:04 utc | 9