howardpark/iraq conflict

In Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, Philip Tetlock went back and checked on the accuracy of predictions made by the so-called experts, and what do you think he found? Their ability to prophesy the future was no better than yours or mine. In fact, it wasn't even better than random guessing. As Louis Menand put it, "Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world... are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys.... And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts." The basic reason for this is that "experts" get so caught up in their own theories that they lose touch with reality. They want so badly to be proven right that they simply stop being able to think objectively. So the next time you want to know how something will turn out, ask your cat.


On the other hand, Tetlock assumes that the "experts" were at least trying to get it right, which these particular guys obviously weren't. They were too busy prostituting themselves to notice that they were helping to drive our country into a bottomless pit.

(Thanks to leiaxe for this link.)

A few days ago, Laura Bush claimed that "no one suffers more" than she and her husband over this whole whatchamacallit Iraq thingie. "No one"? I can think of at least one person who is suffering more than the Bushes--a soldier whose husband was recently killed in Iraq. She writes, "You f---ers and that god-damn lying sack of shit they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad.... F--- you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the god damn mother f---ers who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell."

Laura Bush has lost no loved ones in Iraq. Her daughters have not served their country in Iraq or anywhere else. And her family fortune has profited immensely from the occupation of Iraq, which, strangely enough, she feels is so worthy of (other people's) sacrifice. For her to compare her "suffering" with that of people whose children, parents, spouses, and relatives were sent to their deaths by HER HUSBAND is... well, beyond belief really. In a sane society, someone so monstrously self-absorbed, so disconnected from reality, would be under the care of mental health specialists. Only in the insane society created by Republicans could a bimbo of such magnitude be taken seriously by anyone at all.

As the debate over our military occupation of Iraq continues, some supporters have been reduced to the following justification: "How do you tell the family of the last soldier killed in Iraq that he died for nothing?" By this logic (I use that term loosely), whenever we make a mistake involving human lives, we should refuse to change course and keep on making the same mistake forever. It's as if doctors who had been prescribing a certain drug were to discover that it ended up killing their patients. According to the argument above, they should keep prescribing the drug anyway, because "how do you tell the family of the last patient killed that he died for nothing?" Those who cling to this excuse are saying, in essence, that it is better to sacrifice more human lives than to admit a mistake. It's sheer stubborn stupidity.

Even on a purely emotional level, the "last soldier" idea holds no water. The tragedy is not that the soldier was killed last, but that he died for nothing. Having more soldiers die for nothing doesn't reduce the tragedy in any way. Does anyone seriously imagine that a dead soldier's family will take even the slightest consolation in the news that somebody else was killed after him? Compared to the enormity of death, the position of the death in a sequence of deaths seems to me an obscenely trivial concern, one that exemplifies how puny the justifications for this conflict really are.

The sad truth is that the first, the last, and all of the soldiers killed in Iraq have died for nothing. "Nothing" is the only word that adequately describes the amount of realistic thought that went into the invasion. "Nothing" is what our country will get out of this colossal waste of blood and treasure. Actually, "less than nothing" is more accurate: our enemies have been strengthened beyond their wildest dreams, our allies (or should I say our former allies) have been weakened and angered to the point that they no longer want to cooperate with us, and the general mayhem and distraction have allowed Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong-Il to go on giving us the middle finger with impunity for the last four years. The only Americans who have gained from all of this are the "defense" contractors who were shrewd enough to cultivate such close personal and financial relationships with Bush and Cheney. For them, the occupation of Iraq is like a giant funnel leading directly from the pockets of the American taxpayers into their own. Perhaps that's why Bush is so dead-set on staying in Iraq.

I don't mean to minimize the heartbreak of those who actually lost loved ones at Virginia Tech, but I do wonder about the "grief" displayed by those who had no relationship at all with the victims. Where is their compassion for the hundreds of thousands of slain Iraqis with whom they also share a bond of humanity? Or do we simply have an unspoken agreement that 33 American lives are worth more than a vastly greater number of Iraqi ones?

This is not an empty comparison. The dead in both cases were victims of a homicidal aggressor willing to sacrifice innocent human beings on the altar of his personal agenda. In both cases, the victims did nothing to initiate the aggression, and yet in both cases, the aggressor claimed that he was acting in self-defense. Both Cho and Bush were in fact quite eager to present their flimsy (and in Bush's case, ever-changing) justifications; both saw killing as a valid means to an end; and both were under the delusion that their violence would bring about a new era of justice and enlightenment.

Some will demur at these parallels, pointing out that Bush was acting in the name of a national government, with "legitimate" military objectives. How hollow such distinctions must seem to the millions of Iraqis who have lost fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, children, and grandparents! In any case, as Albert Einstein said, "Killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." There is really no difference between Bush's impulse to war and Cho's impulse to shoot, except that Bush used other people to do his killing for him.

(Thanks to MrBreeze9999 for this picture.)

"Who are these soldiers who are ready to kill and not ready to die?" (General Philippe Morillon)


It takes a lot of courage to drop bombs on people that not only can't touch you but can't even see you.

If George Bush Sr. had known what was going to happen to his name because of the actions of his son, he probably would have named him Bozo instead.