Weekend at Bushies

This will be my next screenplay. It's a wacky comedy based on America's real-world Middle East policy. It will be entitled Weekend at Bushies.

We open in the mountains of Pakistan. A small cluster of soldiers, probably Army Special Forces, descend on an isolated cave dwelling. It's Osama bin Laden's hide-out. There's a brief firefight in which a number of turbaned "insurgents" are shot, possibly while spinning around in slow motion. Then the soldiers enter the cave and discover, to their collective shock, the dead body of Osama bin Laden!

Unfortunately, Bush and Cheney and all their cohorts in the media and Washington have been talking up the capture of Osama for years now. It's no good if he's dead! How can we argue for prolonging the conflict in the Middle East if the guy who blew up the World Trade Center passed away in early 2005 from kidney failure?

The choice is clear (and is stated clearly, in a clip that can be edited directly into the film's trailer)...Karl Rove will just have to devise a way to make it appear that Osama is alive. Probably through the use of wires that can be used to make it look like he's waving hello. Also, they'll have to put him in big oversized sunglasses.

Now, in case you think this is just a one-joke premise, consider all the possible tangents for such a story to take. What if the public seemed unconvinced that Osama was still a threat, and George Bush had to threaten the New York subway system, just to keep the public nice and afraid? That would be a pretty hilarious sequence, you've got to admit. Because, you know, it's so unlikely to really happen.

Or what if Karl Rove is arrested for treason because he leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent to the press out of spite, and George then has to fake the continued existance of not only his arch-nemesis but also his main advisor? See, the increasingly overwhelming complications, combined with the initial goofiness of the premise and the skillfull physical comedy that has made George W. Bush a legend in the comedy business, will make the farce all the more hilarious.

Anyway, you get the idea. In my head right now, I have the image of Karl Rove manipulating Osama bin Laden's dead corpse like a marionette in front of a TV camera, and it's goddamn hilarious. And it does point out a major major extremely large problem with this whole Iraq conflict thing. Without Osama B., who has been missing in action for a while now, we have no fucking idea who we're actually fighting.

As Larry Beinhart sagely points out in this post on Huffington Blog, a post that doesn't try to make its point in nearly such a silly, roundabout way, this whole Mideast misadventure has been based in ideology, not in strategy. There is no strategy, because we don't even have a real enemy.

Also when all this started on 9/11, Al Qaeda membership was in the hundreds, perhaps the thousands. Clearly the insurrection is a lot bigger than that. So either they’re not just Al Qaeda, indeed mostly not Al Qaeda, or we’ve managed to have Al Qaeda grow into the tens of thousands, perhaps the hundreds of thousands.

If we don’t know who they are and why they’re fighting, how can we figure out a strategy. How can we know if what we’re doing is moving toward a solution or making the situation worse.

According to the president’s plan we just have to hang on until the Iraqis have a government. How can we know if an Iraqi government, that we’re willing to let stand, can solve the problem? If we don’t know who the insurgents are, we don’t even know what the problem is.

By now, most Americans have realized the whole WMD in Iraq argument was a sham, an excuse to go to war. To my mind, that's why Bush's numbers are so blissfully low. Americans, taken as a group, are incredibly immensely stupid. It takes years for information to truly sink in to our national consciousness. Think of how difficult it is, when you have an argument with your friend, to bring them over to your side. Many times, people resist new information simply because it's new, and they have some perfectly good old information they've been relying on that hasn't let them down before.

But at this point, Americans know they've been lied to about Iraq, they know the fighting there is going to just go on and on and that minor victories like this new Constitutional referendum are just PR on behalf of a lost cause. And, once Americans have given their trust and had that trust violated, you're out on your ass.

So, great, fine, Bush is going to be a lot less powerful than he has been. I couldn't be more pleased about that. But there's a bigger problem. Beinhart's right - we're in this war and we don't even know who we're fighting.

Think of the terminology that's used in the media to describe our foes. Insurgents. Rebels. Pro-war nitwit Andrew Sullivan uses the delicious term "Islamo-fascists." Can you believe that? Islamo-fascists. I mean, they do love the forbidden dance known throughout the back alleys of Morocco only as The Islamo, but I thought...

Oh, wait, he means Islam Fascists. Sorry.

I just think it's inappropriate to name groups of people whose only connection to one another is fighting Americans. Because there are a lot of different kinds of people coming to Iraq in order to explode Americans, and a lot of other people from even more disparate backgrounds flying all over the world to explode other people in subways, buses, embassies and nightclubs. Are they all Islamo-Fascists, Andy? Do you get a membership card or something? And let me ask you this...Might that card be laminated?

Calling them fascists is so simple. I mean, perhaps these are people who would favor a fascistic theocracy should they ever get the chance to run a country, but right now they're just guys with AK's running around city streets, hoping to lob an explosive device towards a Humvee on behalf of Allah. We don't refer to criminals and enemy combatants by what they one day hope to become. When the cops bust a guy selling stolen guns out of his trunk, they don't book him as an International Arms Kingpin. He's just some low-level scumbag.

Also, fascists typically wore costumes, which makes them easy to recognize. Indiana Jones never had to wonder whether he's wandered into an unsafe area where he might find a collective of Teutonic adversaries; he can tell the Nazi stronghold because there's swastikas on every available surface. How do you know if the guy you're fighting is actually in al-Qaeda. Those guys don't even have a logo. No branding effort at all by their marketing team, really.

We're an army without a goal or mission, stranded in a desert, shooting at anything that moves. Oh, yeah, and we're trying our best to teach a bunch of these guys how to be good firemen, cops and Senators despite the fact that (1) most of us don't speak Arabic, (2) most of them don't speak English, (3) shit's exploding everywhere all the time, (4) most of them hate our fucking guts and (5) our country's pretty low on good firemen and cops itself, and I doubt there's more than 5 actual good Senators anywhere in the world.

The administration – and the military and the intelligence services – have apparently failed to figure out who they’re at war with.

The media has failed, and continues to fail, to ask.

The media just goes ahead and covers it as if it’s a macabre video game in which the generic insurgents have no motivation, no goals, no politics. All they want to do is pop up and shoot at our guys. Which gives our guys the opportunity to shoot at them. Over and around the pop up civilians. And, as with Grand Theft Auto, there’s no particular penalty for killing civilians and bystanders. Our guys have lots of weapons, including tanks and armored vehicles, jets and missiles, bombs and artillery. They have AK-47s and IEDs (improvised explosive devices). We hole up in compounds, they disappear into the population.

YES! Speak on, brother.

If we don’t know what they’re fighting for, then, our only available response is to keep on killing, and getting killed, until one side or the other gets just plain tired of it. General Westmoreland called his official strategy in Vietnam the “meat-grinder.” He believed that if we kept grinding them up they would quit. They didn’t. There is nothing to indicate that our plan in Iraq is anymore sophisticated than that.

This is the fog of ignorance.

So, I can hear my conservative friend Cory asking, what's the solution? Just leave them to their own devices?

A few months ago, I would have said "no." I would have said that we have made this unfortunate mess because of a poorly-planned military action I was against from the very very beginning, but that we now have a responsibility to clean up after ourselves. I thought we were mandated to remain in the country until it was stable, with an infrasturcutre able to function on its own and relative peace.

As I no longer think such a vision is possible in the near future, or possible at all while American troops remain in the country, I now would say we should begin to pull out of Baghdad immediately. Like, tomorrow.

Now, before you say, "But there would be a Civil War!," let me remind you that there is already a civil war going on in Iraq. The difference is that, in addition to attacking one another, both sides are attacking 18 year olds from the Quad Cities as well. That's all I'm suggesting.