Like a Football Bat

Clausewitz talked about the four types of officers.

The bright and lazy, he said, made the Great Captains, because they wanted an easy victory and were smart enough to figure out how to do it.

The bright and energetic made good staff officers, doing the hard work of translating the Great Captain's vision into fifteen page operations orders.

The dull and lazy were easily enough shunt into dead-end jobs and kept out of the way.

But the stupid and energetic, he warned, should be shot out of hand before embarking on campaign. Because they were going to be A Problem.

Would that someone had remembered that maxim before letting Dick Cheney out of the Naval Observitory.

I've gotten to the point where I'm no longer amazed when a Bushite foreign policy plan floats belly-up like a carp in a crapper. The wonder is that anything these idiots plan works out, given what we now know about their moronic cronyism and faith-based policies. But this week's fiasco in Beirut seems impressive even for the sort of people who consider Darth Cheney a "statesman".


Pat Lang sums it up: "We Americans (well, the Bushies) brought this on with our insistence that Shia numbers and electoral success would not be reflected in the division of power within the government of that sad little country. Did we encourage the Sonorans to think that they could demand the self-disembowelment of Hizbullah? Did we really think the Government of Lebanon actually could do that. We may well have. It would be of a piece with the fantasy driven policy of the last eight years. Any gamble, no matter how absurd and improbable of success has fit the pattern of desperate longing that has driven American policy this last decade."

The demographic reality on the ground in Lebanon has been that the Shiite Arabs there have a plurality of both the numbers and politco-military power. The were always going to win out eventually. When you insist that the pit bull defer to the chihuahua you're livin' in a dreamworld, Sparky. But that's BushWorld, where we'd rather be "right" and lose than deal with the devil and win.

Yes, they are allied with Iran. No, they do not have to be enemies of the U.S. They hate Israel and will use whoever they can (Syria, Iran, us...) to get the wherewithal to fight the jewish state. Once we start to understand that Israel's policies do not have to be ours we will be on the way to getting our head out of the quagmire-ass that is the Middle East.

Honestly. These people could fuck up a hot oil foot massage.