The net that shall enmesh them all
Edited, Written, and Published by Josh Nossiter
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
Or maybe a lot more time. Some clear-eyed Americans, John McCain among them, have understood the president’s strategy from the beginning. Hence his remark that we’ll be in Iraq a hundred or a thousand or even ten thousand years. As a veteran warrior and experienced foreign policy expert, Mr. McCain understands that learning as we go may take that long to achieve the desired results. But that’s a small price to pay for planting a big Switzerland right in the middle of the Middle East. Instead of killing each other we’ll have those Iraqis guiding mountaineers and teaching skiing. We’ll wean them off oil and get them making chocolate and watches and cuckoo clocks. Baghdad will become another Zurich, so safe that depositors clamor to bank their life savings there.
For unlettered, unreflective, untutored leaders like Bush and McCain, learning as we go has the additional advantage of not requiring any reading, reflection, or tutelage on their parts. Like the fighter pilots they both were, learning as we go is an invitation to just wing it. Baby. The learning curve may be steep for a long time, but statistical laws tell us that eventually, some day, it will surely flatten. Even Swiss Alps get beaten down over time.
Learning as we go is not without costs. Over four thousand Americans have already paid for the president’s education with their lives. Tens of thousands more have been crippled in the same cause. As for the many tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties and the millions more Iraqi refugees, they at least have the satisfaction of knowing they’ve lost their lives, limbs, or homes for the sake of their own ultimate good. After all what Iraqi wouldn’t, all things considered, rather be in Switzerland?
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A NOTE TO READERS ***Update***
Another three week plus hiatus, from April 30th until May 23rd, again due to Yahoo Geocities dismal service.
There was nothing new at The Nossiter Net between March 3rd and April 26th, 2007, nearly eight weeks. The reason: tech sabotage. Yahoo Geocities, the host for this site, denied access for the entire period. At one point, they even managed to lose all the files. In many discussions with Yahoo staff, no clear explanation was forthcoming. No one seemed able to fix the problem. Ruling out the possibility of Dubbya’s revenge, I finally wrote to Mr. Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Inc and described the ordeal the page had undergone since the beginning of March. A week later, a helpful Yahooo engineer named Jason called. He had my letter before him. Though he couldn’t do the repairs on on the spot, he promised a fix by the next day. That was April 26th, nearly two months after shutting me down in the first place.
The Nossiter Net apologizes, which is more than I can say for Yahoo Geocities.
©Joshua C. Nossiter, 2008
