Pancake City

I have a hunch that the arguments for staying in Iraq are going to be the same no matter what happens in the next six months. If violence abates: “We can’t leave now, things are going well.” If violence spikes, “We can’t leave now, the country will fall apart.”

The situation in my eyes is that staying there screws us in one way, and leaving screws us in a different way. We need to decide which crappy option is less crappy than the other.  As simplistic and crude as that is, it’s probably more intelligent than the cries of “We can’t let the terrorists win” and “The Surrendercrats want to give bin Laden a handjob” that are already being aired.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have put the last one in quotes. But it wouldn’t surprise me to hear it later on. The rhetoric is already being ratched up, nine months before the election.  Like Rep. Steven King’s comments that terrorists would be dancing in the street if Barack Obama won the Presidency. Applications to “So You Think You Can Dance?” will shoot up 280%. There will be a line of middle-Eastern men waiting to audition outside FOX studios.

“Name.”
“Osama bin. My friends call me ‘O’.”
“Dance training?”
“Mostly jazz. A little bit of tap. But hey, who doesn’t know a little bit of tap? Ha ha ha!”

On a final note, isn’t “Surrendercrats” a great name for a Saturday morning cartoon?”Surrendercrats, HOOOOO!” Every time they meet a bad guy, they dive under a table. “Is he gone?” “I don’t know. Check.” “No, you check.”

An exceedingly common refrain when criticizing the invasion of Iraq is that “we took our eye off the ball” (the Taliban in Afghanistan). A web headline on The Washington Post’s site today is “Eye On The Ball, America.” It’s about the Mideast peace process.

Are we so stupid that we are incapable of talking about foreign policy without using sports metaphors? It’s not even a smart sports metaphor. “Keep your eye on the ball” is what Little League coaches yell at eight-year-olds who are too distracted by that dog licking himself on the sideline to pay attention. It’s a miracle President Bush said “Mission Accomplished” in 2003 rather than “Touchdown!”

This isn’t an idle point. Language both reflects and influences our thought processes. Our thoughts can only be as complex as the words we use to utter them. When politicians say, “We gotta get the bad guys,” do you know what they’re thinking? It’s not, “We need to judiciously marshal our resources to target radical Islamic fundamentalists that wish to harm us without inflaming the world and creating a bigger problem than what we started with.” The thought is, “We gotta get the bad guys.” Or perhaps even “Bad guys bad” if they are getting linguistic help from a teleprompter.

A large part of the reason political discussions are so simple-minded and devoid of substance is because of the language politicians use. Is “Pullout now / We can’t surrender” any different from “Tastes great / Less filling”? By the time a complex discussion gets hacked by television media into 15 second sound bites and repeated ad nauseam on 24-hour cable networks or by ideologues on political talk shows or radio, it doesn’t resemble a discussion anymore. It’s just sloganeering, and the small percentage of people trying to think independently and evaluate the available information wonder why they have so much trouble doing so.

I don’t know how much to blame politicians for this. When they say something nuanced, their words get twisted and distorted by their opponents. If it’s not a snappy sound bite, news networks will prune qualifications and conditions from the original statement until it becomes one. And that what gets remembered. There is something about human psychology that makes us receptive to short, simple messages (see: Basis For All of Advertising). It’s a shame few politicians point this out and at least try to raise the level of discourse.

The original justification for the surge, the addition of 30,000 combat troops to Iraq last spring and summer, was to to reduce violence to a low enough level so that political progress could be made in the Iraqi legislature. In addition, tactics were changed to create a temporary reprise from violence, such as paying and assisting the Sunni Awakening forces to kill extremists rather than the U.S. military and rival Shiite:

The predominantly Sunni Awakening forces, referred to by the U.S. military as the Sons of Iraq or Concerned Local Citizens, are made up mostly of former insurgents who have turned against extremists because of their harsh tactics and interpretation of Islam. The U.S. military pays many fighters roughly $10 a day to guard and patrol their areas. Thousands more unpaid volunteers have joined out of tribal and regional fealties.  (link)

Nine months later, here is where we stand. Read the rest of this entry »