Some Minor Details

Just some sweeping up in the market place of ideas. In some of the mental gutters of the internet you'll find imbeciles mocking Obama for his evident confusion and hesitation with regards to the Egyptian Revolution while they contrast this with their delusions about bush II's steely resolve and strategic brilliance. (I shan't be linking to such puke-sites. You can find them if you want to.)

The argument is that while Obama is clearly out of his depth, bush II was in control of events. Obama ("Obambi" to some of these morons) can only react incoherently while bush II directed his Middle East policies.

Well, first of all, one must remember that this revolution came almost out of nowhere. (Well, it came out of thirty years of dictatorship, torture, corruption and economic incompetence, but you get the idea.) Wikileaks (demonized by Washington, London, and all the corrupt souls in the mainstream media) revealed documentation exposing the massive corruption of the Tunisian dictatorship, which, combined with the suicide from despair of Mohamed Bouazizi, sparked a public uprising against dictatorship and misery without end. Roughly a month after the uprising in Tunisia erupted, the fire had spread to Egypt.

The point is, we can bet that had something like this occurred on bush II's watch, the stammering dullard (and his shit-head advisers Rumsfeld, Rice, and Cheney) would have been just as confused, if not more so, and might have responded even more disastrously than Obama has.

How can I be sure of this? What did bush II accomplish in Iraq? Did he create a functioning democracy? Not really. There are elections, but it is a corrupt "vague democracy" that is on its way to becoming a failed state. It is a country riven (perhaps by Washington design) by sectarian and ethnic divisions, between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. It saw the increase of religious fundamentalist power and a precipitous fall in women's rights. It is a country where the police are universally feared as rapists, thieves, torturers and murderers. It is a country without hope.

Afghanistan is a similar disaster. Corruption appears to be the state's sole occupation. There too, human rights are a distant fantasy. It could be argued that human rights were no worse under the Taliban.

Remember that the cost in American lives for bush II's blunders and/or evil has been in the thousands. Tens of thousands have been wounded and maimed. Trillions have been spent.

Remember too that thanks to bush II, Syria and Iran (previously enemies) have formed a compact of sorts. Iraq itself is governed by politicians with more loyalties to Iran than Saddam Hussein ever had with the former USSR. Hezbollah has risen to prominence in Lebanon thanks to continued Israeli atrocities.

So, in answer to the dead-enders, still trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's anus, the reality is that bush II was a revolting failure who would have responded to the Egyptian Revolution just as badly as Obama has, if not hugely more so.