Take a swing at the Middle East Piñata

[walks through the living room, where the drunken celebrants in the Scooter Libby Guilty! Conga Line collapsed in a stupor last night, into the kitchen / begins to brew the coffee of harsh reality]

On the walk to work this morning, I listend to a Democracy now interview with Wes Clark that depressed me.  As much as I think we committed a terrible crime in invading Iraq, and as much as I wish we could remove American troops from Iraq as soon as possible, Gen. Clark makes an observation that I suspect will cause me to lose sleep tonight:

...let's say we did follow the desires of some people who say, “Just pull out, and pull out now.” Well, yeah. We could mechanically do that. It would be ugly, and it might take three or four months, but you could line up the battalions on the road one by one, and you could put the gunners in the Humvees and load and cock their weapons and shoot their way out of Iraq....You’d probably get safely out of there. But when you leave, the Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias. Who are they going to find? Al-Qaeda, because the groups of Sunnis who would be extremists and willing to fight would probably be the groups connected to al-Qaeda. So one of the weird inconsistencies in this is that were we to get out early, we’d be intensifying the threat against us of a super powerful Sunni extremist group, which was now legitimated by overt Saudi funding in an effort to hang onto a toehold inside Iraq and block Iranian expansionism.

In short, the American Monster Machine that created Al-Qaeda in the first place, by giving money to Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, has created a whole new monster in Iraq.  Thanks to Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, and that lying bastard Colin Powell, we have created a situation that is a thousand times more threatening to our national security than Saddam Hussein was.  Sure, Saddam was a murderous creep, but 1.) we created him, 2.) his job wasn't easy, and 3.) we're not exactly succeeding as his replacement.

Clark also mentions in the interview that a friend of his in the Pentagon, who shall remain nameless, told him about "a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”  The only thing that has apparently held this goal in check is our absolute failure to get a handle on Iraq.

I can't help but cast the Bush Administration as a group of kids, celebrating at a birthday party.  Someone has strung up a Middle East piñata from the tree in the front yard and everyone is clamoring to take a swing at it.  They're greedy for the candy inside (or in this case, oil and power), and the first blow has released a little trickle of treats.  But the Bush kids are milling around, eager for the blow that will break open the piñata's belly.  When the Middle East bursts open and spills all over the front lawn, they want to rush in and grab up as much as they can.  Some will come away with their pockets full of ill-gotten gains, some will come away with bruises and scratches from the melee, and at the end of the day, the piñata will still be lying on the front lawn, its papier mâché entrails hanging out.  As dusk falls, the sprinkler will kick on.