Now, with the Right Whine-o-sphere and the Polite Punditry and that lot, you'd think this would be easy, but a cruise through both Lower and Higher Wingnuttia, as well as a tour of Upper Cognoscenti, failed to unearth anything very remarkable. Oh sure, there was lots of the usual idiocy, bad faith, pomposity, catachresis, goat-blowing stupidity, etc., but nothing that just screamed out, "Hear My Savage, Sticky Yawp!" (Though I was tempted to put forward Insty, for something Roy deftly disposed of well before tiffin -- yadda yadda, the Singuarity will give him Godlike Hehindeed Powers, hooray for the Robofuture, let's contemplate Citizen Journalists with Laser Beam Bellybuttons, bleah.)
So I'm left with the easy pickings: Dean Barnett, at Hugh Hewitt's, for this fine illustration of the Wingnut Foreign Policy Syllogism:
1. Major Premise: The Islamic Hordes Are Shockingly Uncivilized.
Barnett treats us to such Nuggets of Wisdom as "The Islamic world hasn’t really excelled at living in peace over the past several decades. More specifically, Shiites and Sunnis have never been great in the peaceful coexistence department." Also, "Angry Shiites can be a handful," and "Iraq’s Sunni population is no day at the beach."
2. Minor Premise: The Islamic Hordes Are So Gosh Darn Uncivilized, They Will Never Be Civilized.
Barnett opines, wistfully: "There is a deep undercurrent of savagery in the Iraqi culture that will not just inhibit the growth of a peaceful democracy there, but probably prohibit it." These are indeed Tough Noogies. The Administration erred, sadly, in believing the benighted Iraqis were desirous of not getting shot at all the damn time. Alas! George Bush's sin is that he fell prey to the Melancholy Fallacy of Excess Nobility. The poor, sad-assed motherfucker.
3. Conclusion: We Need to Bomb the Everliving Shit out of These Ungrateful Little Ill-Mannered Foreign Peckerheads.
No, he really says that. The only answer, as it has always been, is to stamp out that ferocious, pitiless savagery ferociously and savagely, without pity.
At the end of this war, Iraq must necessarily be composed of people who always wanted to live in peace and the one-time enemies of peace who have come to realize they have no other choice but to live in peace. How much killing will this take? That will depend on how many enemies of peace there are and how determined they are to live in a state of war.Though he does add, "One thing's for certain - the more resolute we are, the less killing there will be." Indeed. The more people we kill, the fewer people we will, uh, have to kill.
The reason this whole Iraqi adventure was always doomed was precisely this inability to decide if we were out for retribution or justice, revenge or charity, occupation or liberation. A war of choice cannot rest on one asscheek alone.
As I've said before. Shorter warbloggers, war planners, and wingnuts:
Exterminate all the brutes.