The War Is Stupid

I think what bothers me most about our imbroglio in Iraq is that it is stupid.

Every week, every day, and nearly every hour, news erupts from our war in Iraq that is stupid. Today's Post reports that President Bush has been on the telephone with a Shiite leader, urging him to include the Sunnis in the constitutional process. The process has gotten so screwed up that we've been forced to go to bat for the Sunnis. You know. Saddam's people. The former elite minority of Iraq. The ones what had the rest of the joint securely under thumb. Freedom is on the march. Indeed.

(For an excellent primer on the current state of the Iraqi constitution, see Juan Cole's article in today's Salon.)

It's stupid that the United States invaded Iraq in the first place, stupid like if we'd invaded Mexico to avenge Pearl Harbor, like Richard Clarke said. It's stupid that the United States disbanded the Iraqi army, allowed porous borders, permitted looting, didn't start with enough boots on the ground, turned over Abu Ghraib prison to military intelligence, didn't find WMD, didn't capture or kill UBL, signed off on proportional elections and otherwise alienated the Sunnis, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. It's stupid that nobody, including the president of the United States, can tell you why we're at war in one honest sentence. It's stupid that one of the war's MOST ENDURING images is a lady with a cigarette in her mouth POINTING AT A PENIS.

And the reasons get more and more stupid. In a previous post, I lambasted the "flypaper" theory as being the worst war rationale yet. "Yet." Just this week, the president topped it by telling us that the United States has already lost about 1,800 American soldiers, so we might as well keep at it.

It's even stupid that it took somebody's MOTHER to give voice to the opposition, but even more stupid that the only thing that people who LIKE the war can think to do is to attack HER. It sort of reminds me of when the Starr Brigade was witch-hunting Bill Clinton. They kept telling me, "But he lied. He lied about sex," to which I kept saying, "I DON'T CARE." I don't care if Cindy Sheehan is in the middle of a divorce. I don't care if she has allied herself with moveon.org. I don't care if she had Fruit Loops for breakfast. None of it affects my admiration for a woman who has simply taken a stand and in doing so has energized debate and focused opposition. Cindy Sheehan is awesome and no amount of right-wing stick-poking at her is going to alter that.

And as Wesley Clark (sort of) wrote in the Post today, no amount of trying to rally the resolve of Americans is going to account for the execution of a war that is stupid. And it is. And you know it is, too.

So there.