Same old story, same old song and dance

By Libby

I'm still moving kind of slow but it's not just the hideous pharmaceutical cocktail my doctor prescribed that's causing my ennui, the news simply isn't doing it for me. I've been spending the last couple of days clearing out old saved links and I feel like I'm caught inside an old vinyl record skipping on the turntable.

Four years ago Islamic insurgents held sway in Anbar. That was before they called them AQI and declared The Awakening. Today, if you ignore the little suicide bombings cropping up again in Anbar, the new last stronghold is in Mosul. Yes, that would be the same last stronghold that was supposed to be secured in the offensive last January as part of Operation Iron Harvest, the U.S.-led offensive in Nineveh, Diyala, Tameem, and Salaheddin provinces that kicked off at that time. Which is not to be confused with the early signs of surge strategy success in Diyala in 2007.

I read about the assault on Fallujah in April 04:

For the past three weeks, around 2,000 troops from the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, supported by jet fighters and attack helicopters, have carried out the most ferocious urban street fighting in Iraq since the start of the war last year. [...]

Inside Falluja, a city of 300,000, the marines prevented access to the city's only hospital for more than two weeks. Dozens of houses were destroyed, mosques were bombed and clerics turned a football ground beside the Euphrates into a crude cemetery. [...]

On the day that Wisam and Thair died, a US general in Baghdad said the aim of the new combat in Falluja, codenamed Operation Vigilant Resolve, was to "take the fight to the enemy".

Actually that one was launched in response to the four Blackwater contractors that were killed and hung off the bridge. Back then the White House was still maintaining the fiction that the insurgency was small and confined to Fallujah. Nonetheless, it doesn't read all that differently from the news accounts of the recent crackdown in Sadr City.

Four years ago Doug Feith testified before the House Armed Services Committee.

Combatant commanders will no longer "own" forces, he said. "(Secretary Rumsfeld) makes clear to everybody, the only person who owns forces, as it were, is the president, who can use the armed forces of the United States across regions as necessary," he said.

At the same time it was discovered the Pentagon lost track of thousands of exported Stinger anti-aricraft weapons. As far as I know they never found them or the thousands of other small arms that disappeared along with the pallets of US cash along the way. This week, CIA chief Michael Hayden announced we've defeated AQ -- again. Nothing changes except the names of the spokesliars who parrot the latest rosy predictions of victory.

Meanwhile our dead and wounded still arrive home by the thousands in the dark of night but everybody is talking about delegate counts and Obama quitting his church. I doubt that will change by tomorrow.

Seems like just yesterday everybody was complaining about how the media dwells too much on trivia. I'm so glad bloggers are better than that.

Comments

[reader_iam]

Well, Libby, given your concerns and preferred outcomes, it's a little hard to reconcile that presidential nominees and election-processes (whether you, or I, like them or not) are trivia, or that it would be preferable for them to be rendered more opaque, rather than transparent.

***

I spent quite a bit of time, on C-Span, the wranglings over primary/caucus rules several years ago. (Yeah, call me crazy. Certainly, it's at least weird.) Compared to what was going on then, they would have been seen--AND WERE!--as trivial. No one paid attention, not really, in the MSM or blogosphere. And the process, much less what actually took place within the process (what people said, what the arguments were, what axes of any brand were being ground, what deals were struck or not, and etc.), practically speaking were opaque. They didn't rise even to the level of static. Things just went along; they took their course. Like your average planning commission or zoning board meetings and hearing, they were (too often to later detriment), assigned to the boring, less pressing, "just trivia" categories. From what I can see, the attitude was, "We'll worry about that later. Too boring, and it probably won't matter anymore. There are more pressing, serious things to focus on."

Gotta ask you, Libby: How is the outcome of all of that working for you?

[reader_iam]

Correction/clarification: I spent quite a bit of time watching ...

[Libby]

Iam, point well taken but we're not talking about changing the rules overall here, we're talking about finagling the existing rules on a one time basis. I would have been a lot more interested in this if they had actually been trying to come up with a permanent long term fix for what is obviously a broken system and if that was the case, I would agree that it was imperative we not only pay strict attention but attempt to influence the outcome.

In the instant matter, I foresee days of bickering and obsessing over a situation that doesn't appreciably change the outcome, or resolve differences, but instead will simply provide more meaningless fodder for the horserace narrative. Meanwhile, the real vote problem, that being that we still don't have a decent way to verify the general vote in November will be ignored and it could still come back and bite us in the butt. Not to mention, we do have many other greater issues that get ignored in these silly kerfluffles. I'm very concerned for instance that the White House is using this distraction to build the framework behind the scenes for a strike on Iran.

All that being said, I was more irritated last night by the half page of buzz I saw about Obama quitting his church, as that has any importance whatsoever in the greater challenges that are going to be facing us.

Maybe it's just all the damn medication making me so cranky, but my point is, can't we please get our priorities straight? It bothers me when I see Blogtopia furthering the same trivial narrative that we accuse the media of perpetrating. The old saying about being part of the solution comes to mind...