Developed from a response I posted on an earlier thread, and now up at
http://www.livejournal.com/users/plaidder:**************************
I was telling Liza about Bush's speech the other night and she expressed surprise that they couldn't come up with anything better. I said, "Well, what can they say? They'd have to say 'OK, this was a huge mistake, sorry folks, we're pulling out now'...otherwise it's lipstick on a pig." They went for the lipstick approach. Right now, that pig is wearing more lipstick than Deanna Troi at the junior prom...but it's not helping.
The latest development in porcine cosmetics is the "flypaper strategy." This is basically the administration's version of "I MEANT to do that!" Andrew Sullivan expounds the flypaper strategy in a recent article: by turing Iraq into a swamp of chaos and violence, we lure all the Islamic terrorists into Baghdad, thus drawing them away from other areas of the world...and then we kill them all so there are no more terrorists.
Andrew Sullivan believes that this was always the plan, and that it is a "beauty." Well, what can you expect from a gay man who shills for the Republicans.
I can hardly believe that something this dumb NEEDS to be dissected, but for the benefit of Andrew, who apparently will believe any load of horseshit that anyone dishes out to him, let me point out a few of the flaws:
1) This 'strategy' (again, IMHO, this is not a 'strategy' at all) relies on the assumption that there is a finite supply of terrorists, and that once you kill the ones currently operating, there will never be any more. In fact, just about every example in human history has shown that killing one generation of terrorists simply produces a new, larger, meaner, more desperate generation of terrorists. How long are we planning to keep Iraq in a state of total anarchy?
I would also remind Andrew that the "let 'em all die so there won't be any more of 'em" approach was adopted by certain elements on the right during the height of the AIDS epidemic. As an HIV+ gay man, you'd think he'd be distressed to hear the same rhetoric applied to someone else. You'd think. But you'd apparently be wrong.
2) Human beings are not insects, people. This is human life we are talking about. Do you want a world where humans can be crushed like bugs and everyone thinks nothing of it? Are you sure? Will you be psyched to wake up in this brave new world and find you have been transformed into a giant cockroach?
3) Another way in which people are not insects: Bugs have to be bugs, and nothing else in nature's kingdom can become a bug, no matter what its incentives might be. The same is not true for terrorists. Nobody's born a terrorist; and often people who have been involved in terrorism in the past don't die terrorists either. It is quite possible to control terrorism by giving people the means of becoming something else. So how about we try doing *that,* instead of just killing everyone who passes through Iraq?
4) Not a very good deal for Iraq, is it? Who knew that "liberate" meant "intentionally draw every heavily-armed lunatic in the Eurasian land mass to your hometown"?
5) So, you say you don't give a shit abotu the valute of human life or the conditions in which the Iraqi people are living or the fact that our soldiers are stuck on this 'flypaper' too. All you care about is the war on terror, and you want the policy argument. OK, here it is:
If you really want to do pest control, flypaper is about the dumbest thing you could use.
First of all, any pest control device you buy in the store will advertise that it kills the damn things in their nests/hives/holes/whatever. The important thing is to go to the source. Waiting around to snag the individual roaches as they come running out into daylight may be satisfying but it's not very useful.
Second...well, anyone who has ever done battle with Japanese beetles will know this is a load of crap. See, they sell these phermone traps you can use that work along the same lines as the 'flypaper strategy.' You put them up near your garden, and they emit a strong scent that draws the beetles away from your plants and into the trap. However, as you find out if you research these traps for like 10 seconds, they are counterproductive because the draw is SO powerful that they bring Japanese beetles in from miles around. Hundreds and thousands of beetles who under normal circumstances would never have bothered you hear that there is a hot to trot beetle over at your house, and they fly in, and when they realize there isn't one, they get hungry...and there's your garden, not 20 feet away. So the traps in fact work so well that they actually make the problem worse. Your plants are getting eaten down to the nub, AND you have to empty thousands of beetle corpses out of the stupid trap every day.
So who would use a Japanese beetle phermone trap? Only someone who enjoys killing beetles more than s/he enjoys having the flowers bloom unmolested. Or, someone who doesn't have the patience to use more effective but labor-intensive methods like milky spore.
Remind us of anyone we know?
Frankly, if I hadn't seen Sullivan's blog I wouldn't have believed that a single human being in America would see the "flypaper strategy" as anything other than a last desperate attempt on the part of the administration to make it look as if they are handling a situation that is now completely beyond their control. But we learn something new every day, I suppose.
There is no doubt that Iraq is a sticky situation right now. But I think we are dealing with an entirely different kind of stickiness. It's not flypaper. It's the LaBrea Tar Pits, and we are the mammoth, sinking slowly under our own weight into the depths of extinction.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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