Where the thin men stalk the streets / While the sane stay underground

So the report of the Iraq Study Group is out. And has been tossed around by the various pundits, on both sides of the spectrum (although the pro-war community increasingly only talks to itself or has shut up in shame). The nutters and the Murdoch media are labelling it a surrender for gods sake, as illustrated. One armchair general on the always enlightening Little Green Footballs complained that only 3000 had died in Iraqnam and the US and it's allies had taken bigger losses than before and won. All true of course. That is assuming of course that the other half a million dead (they are your allies, no?) are sub-human and not worthy of being counted. But I guess on LGF that assumption is a given. What actually astounds me is not what the group has come up with in its deliberations (which in terms of a way forward really isn’t much at all) but, rather, how long its taken and how much money and committee hours have been spent in order for these esteemed people to tell the US Government pretty much what the rest of us have known for years. Firstly that Iraq is a damned mess…that’s been on obvious outcome before the first tanks rolled over the border or the first cruise slammed into a market. Secondly that Bush and all his various agencies and military organisations have actively and knowingly lied about the extent of the mess for years. A swift daily look at this site is enough to know this. Thirdly, that Bush and his cabal are responsible for the mess.

I don't want to sound like an arrogant know it all saying we told you so but...yes we know that, and I can’t help but think that this post on Daily Kos really sums up the way many of us feel. I know I do. Whilst Bush, the President you elected, still sits in the White House we can’t take you seriously as a nation anymore.

Fear will not be enough when the whole world is convinced that America will not correct its current ways, and that the problem is not just the current administration.

And the message still hasn’t got through. The man in The White House (I used call him a buffoon but half a million dead goes somewhat beyond the description of buffoonery) is now trying to lay down the conditions under which he will talk to Iran and Syria. He really doesn’t get it. He, and his nation are no longer in any position to set the conditions for discussion…he should be on his knees begging for whatever assistance these nations can give. I don't particularly like the governments of those countries but the USA no longer has the moral authority to set conditions or make the rules. So another parallel to Vietnam becomes obvious,. Like Richard Nixon in the early seventies, and into Watergate, the President has become so self obsessed and deluded that any semblance of reality has disappeared from his world. He can’t see what everyone else can see.

And yet like Matt Tabbi in Rolling Stone, I can’t help that feel that the US political system is now so irredeemably corrupt that nothing will change