The Lightning-Rod Men

"...you mere man who comes here to put you and your pipestem between clay and sky, do you think that because you can strike a bit of green light from the Leyden jar that you can thoroughly avert the supernal bolt? Your rod rusts, or breaks, and where are you?"

Do you ever wonder exactly why the USA is losing the fight in Iraq? And why we didn't commit more troops in the first place, just to be sure it was a done deal? Bush still had the popular edge then -- it would scarcely have been a PR risk. And why Bush won't pull out even now, when the short-term sense of failure would surely be overwhelmed by the relief over no more deaths? Or why he didn't simply pull the troops out after that soul-stirring election they had over there, and count on the short American attention span not to notice how badly things went afterwards (vide Afghanistan)?

We here at the Pessimism Info Center have been brainstorming this one for a while, and at last we've come up with a sufficiently cyncial and paranoid answer... that we don't want to win. Bad enough for you? We're pretty proud!

Rick Santorum provides us with an interesting analogy to illustrate the principle, which Mr. Colbert twists about:



But Santorum is actually saying that the USA is Mount Doom, and the eye of Sauron is the attention of the terrorists... no, forget it. To sum up: in Santorum's view (and in the PIC's theory, the administration's as well), the longer the Iraqis take the brunt of the terrorist attacks, the less rough stuff, terror-wise, we get on the homefront.

That somewhat blunts Bush's self-congratulatory rhetoric about having "liberated" the Iraqis, since after all we're only using them as decoys, you see, a bit embarrassing to admit, naturally, their being sitting ducks as it were -- possibly up to 600,000 sitting ducks so far -- and let's not even mention the American troops out there in harm's way -- but thankfully nobody's noticed those hobbits yet. (Frodogeorge and Samdick wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, humming God Bless America as they march into the lair of Sauron Hussein, oops Osauron bin Laden! An Image For OUR TIMES. Watch out for that spider!)

So in this cold bit of realpolitik a long war is exactly what the neocons are going for: a lightning-rod for jihad. Because no one minds Iraqis and GIs dying, just ordinary people, or so the logic goes....

But spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my neighbors, the lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man.

-- Herman Melville