Following McCain's justification for our never-ending presence in Iraq, we have Douglas Feith, one of the architects of the invasion, on the Diane Rehm show (listen
here ) defending himself against a charge of being either a mass murderer or "
the dumbest fucking guy on the planet", maybe both.
Interestingly, Feith's father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, which ought to have made his son sensitive to the wreckage bad government can visit on frail human bodies, but instead it seems to have turned him into an appeasement-is-for-sissies kind of guy: "
Chamberlain wasn’t popular in my house". He accuses his opponents of foolishly "trusting" tyrants and bullies, a willful misinterpretation of those who lobby for peace instead of war. Feith never quite grasps the fact that for all his willingness to fight, it's someone else who will have to travel to a foreign land and actually be shot at by unfriendly strangers.
Now he and the rest of the rats are writing their books and swarming the talk shows to explain how very afraid,
afraid,
AFRAID they were of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "
We invaded Iraq because we were afraid they'd attack us. He was shooting at our flyovers! He had aluminum tubes! What if there'd been smallpox?!
How about this explanation, instead: "My boss is a dry drunk, we're all a bunch of hysterics, we whipped each other up into a frenzy and the next thing we knew, we'd gone through billions of dollars and thousands of of people lay dead." Feith's is the the kind of defense we might expect in a trailer park shooting, as he tries to convince the jury that the reckless use of firearms was inspired not by actual danger, but by fear.
Who then is a greater threat to those we love? Dark-browed villains in foreign lands, or bland monsters like Douglas Feith, who start wars they can't finish? And how shall we defend ourselves from our rulers' good intentions?
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
