I Like This Poem Because It Mentions Titties

I also thought it might apply to the Georgia/Russia conflict as much as it did to the Soviet invasion of Hungary:

uncle sam shrugs his pretty
pink shoulders you know how
and he twitches a liberal titty
and lisps 'i'm busy right now'

so rah-rah-rah- democracy
let's all be thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)"

But then I went looking for an old piece by Gwyn Dyer, in which he predicted a Russian military Renaissance, and found this one instead, in which he lays a verbal pounding on the Saakashvili regime. His conclusion:

There is no great moral issue here. What Georgia tried to do to South Ossetia is precisely what Russia did to Chechnya, but Georgia wasn't strong enough and South Ossetia had a bigger friend. There is no great strategic issue either: apart from a few pipeline routes, the whole Transcaucasus is of little importance to the rest of the world.

In six months' time, we probably won't even remember this foolish adventure.

A conclusion I think I disagree with. For one thing, Georgia has already called home about half the troops involved in its Iraq deployment, and its hard to see them maintaining their role in that country in the required numbers and with the required enthusiasm. Furthermore, the President's of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, all current or former contributors to the Multinational force in Iraq, issued a statement yesterday in which they asked NATO and the West to do more than "twitch a liberal titty"in response to the Russian invasion. So far they seem to have got little in the way of a concrete reply from Western leaders, and I imagine they're beginning to wonder just what their participation in the Western War Of Terror has bought them lately, and thinking that, going forward, maybe they won't be playing that game so much.

PS. National Post Uber Hawk Jonathon Kay has already thrown in the towel on behalf of the West, referring to Democracy as an "abstraction".

Georgia To U.S.: We Fought In Your War And All We Got Were These Lousy Platitudes

"As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?”"

Short Answer: because America is weak and broke and losing two wars already, and the line they fed you about standing together for Freedom was a load of bullshit from the word go. Sorry.

Lafta In Canada

Dr. Riyahd Lafta is an Iraqi researcher who had collaborated on the recent Lancet study that put the Iraqi death toll at about 655,000 since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Earlier this year his attempt to visit the U.S.A. and present this research, as well as new material on rising childhood cancer rates in southern Iraq, was stymied by the U.S. state department. Furthermore, his attempts to visit Canada (Simon Fraser University) failed when the British government refused to offer him a transit visa through that country. Talk about attacking the messenger!

Luckily, however, an airline was found that flies direct from Jordan to Canada, and Dr. Lafta is now in Vancouver. Details of his story, and his Friday (Jul. 20th) web-cast can be found here.

h/t to Deltoid.

Proof

...that Christopher Hitchens has been drinking:

So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003? That's exactly what I mean to say.

Apparently, he's talking with an invisible friend perched atop his whiskey bottle.

Nice hair though. I've always liked his hair.

Another Neo-Con Washes His Hands Of It All

In August I wrote a short post entitled "Conservatives Pre-Spin Iraq Defeat", in which I argued that U.S. Conservatives (in particular the N.Y. Post's Ralph Peters) were getting set to throw in the towel on Iraq and, when they did, they would blame the Iraqis themselves for the whole catastrophe. Well, about six months later Charles (the Kraut Hammer) Krauthammer has, as if on cue, emerged and denied all responsibility for the disaster, on behalf of himself, his Conservative ideology, and his Conservative President. He writes:

America comes and liberates them from the tyrant who kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient animosities and more recent resentments begin to play themselves out to deadly effect. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, the overwhelming majority of them killed by Sunni insurgents, Baathist dead-enders and their al Qaeda allies who carry on the Saddamist pogroms.

[...]

Iraqis were given their freedom and yet many have chosen civil war. Among all these religious prejudices, ancient wounds, social resentments, and tribal antagonisms, who gets the blame for the rivers of blood? You can always count on some to find the blame in America.

[...]

...Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.

And you know what? I'm just going to repeat what I said in August:

This excuse has been brewing among the American Right since 2004, when the insurgency first took a solid hold. But they've been holding it in reserve until recently when things really started to go South on them.

Specifically, the excuse runs as follows: The U.S. invasion was actually a gift to the Iraqi people, and all those bombs were the sound of Freedom coming. If the Iraqis had just behaved like a conquered people should behave, they too could have had a Starbucks on every corner. But they've fucked it up. Hence, when the last American soldier gets hauled off out of the Green Zone by helicopter, shit flying out of the bottom of his pant-leg, the mess he leaves behind will not be the fault of the good old U.S. of A.

Expect to hear more of this argument in the coming weeks and months. Expect a recurrence maybe two years down the road in Afghanistan, mouthed by whatever Canadian politicians are in power at the time.

h/t to Boswarlos Daily.