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The 'Rules' of The Game
One of the charms of sports is that they keep score. For example, if like me you're a fan of Michigan Wolverines football, no amount of rationalization can hide the dismal fact that, this season, we've been sentenced to root for a terrible team.
By contrast, in the world of politics, it's possible to go on a 4 1/2-year losing streak and still claim that things are actually going well.
That's what's happening this week in Washington, as the White House pulls out all the stops to try to convince people "the surge" is working, that there's light at the end of the tunnel, and that therefore Congress should give the Bush administration yet more time to get the occupation of Iraq turned around.
In the game of politics, you can get away with this kind of thing for several reasons.
First, you can mess around with statistics and claim that, while most observers think you've only kicked a couple of field goals, you've really scored several touchdowns.
This is what the Pentagon is doing with statistics on civilian violence in Iraq. While sources such as The Associated Press and The Washington Post have concluded that - by their calculations - there's been no decline in violence in Iraq as a whole, the Pentagon says it has classified information that what it defines as sectarian violence is down by as much as 75 percent. (As a Michigan fan, I wish our coaches could conjure up a few "secret" touchdowns that no one remembers happening, but which mysteriously appear on the scoreboard just before time runs out).
Moreover, you can change the rules in the middle of the game.
The original point of the surge was to create enough stability to allow the Iraqi government, such as it is, to start unifying the country. That's why Congress has forced the Bush administration to keep score, by specifying various benchmarks that were supposed to be achieved.
So what happened? The Government Accountability Office, which Congress appointed to referee the game, has just reported that almost none of the benchmarks have been met. The Bush administration has reacted by declaring that the grading process is unfair, because partial credit isn't being given for making progress toward achieving them.
This is the equivalent of a football coach complaining that his offense should be credited with scoring a couple of points for having moved a bit down the field, even though it ended up fumbling the ball away.
Beyond this, the politics of the Iraq war dictate that if cooking the statistics doesn't do the trick, and altering the rules of the game still doesn't put you ahead, you can simply declare that you were never playing football in the first place.
This has already happened several times. At first, the game was called Disarm the Crazy Dictator. When it turned out Saddam Hussein didn't have WMD after all, the game suddenly became Create a Glorious Mideast Democracy.
Then, when we found ourselves down 42-0 at the half in that contest, it was announced we were now playing We Can't Leave Because There Will Be Chaos, aka The Pottery Barn Olympics.
Figuring out the score in this latest game is quite complicated, but a hint of how hard it is to play is provided by one of Gen. David Petraeus' advisers, Stephen Biddle, a military analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Biddle, winning We Can't Leave Because There Will Be Chaos will require deploying 100,000 American troops in Iraq for the next 20 years, and even then the odds of winning will be what he calls "a long-shot gamble."
Does this sound like a game worth playing? Before trying to answer that, we ought to fire all the current coaching staff.
Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.
© 2007 The Rocky Mountain News
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Show AllIf someone claimed they had "classified information" that Bush was secretly an al Qaeda agent and was taking orders from bin Laden, I would find that much more plausible than any of the administration explanations for what is happening in Iraq. To use a football analogy, it sure looks like Bush is the prized quarterback on Osama's team.
It's not just the illegal occupation - the loyalbushies and loyalbushieDems employ the same liquid rules across the board. Caught spying illegally? Rewrite the law so the lawbreakers are granted immunity retroactively while new "rules" are written to make the once illegal legal. Free market? Only if profits are flowing to the top. Once the money slows, new "rules" are written to bail out those at the top, while corporate subsidies and earmarks and no bid contracts flow to friends of the family, who simultaneously scream about "big government waste" like child health care and free lunch programs. Want to destroy protected land to harvest resources? No sweat - the Interior Dept. changes the "rules" to allow certain corporations (AKA big donors) to rape and pillage.
It's not just the illegal occupation - the entire "game" is rigged to favor the rich and the corporate. Another example? More pot smokers are in jail than corporate economic terrorists. Because, er, stealing billions isn't quite as evil as toking a doobie...
The game is to continue the game. Bush at present stalls a pull out from Iraq for the 08 elections. Republicans would rather face trying to get elected while not having to admit Bush's failure as they would during a pullout.
However this prolongs the forever war rationale. We have to be there otherwise we won't be there, so why did we go there at all? Good question but the only answer turned out to be wrong.
Well they sure hate us now and when we leave they will throw out what we americans have left them and do it all their way anyway someday. We know this. So to forestall leaving Bush says cites his oil contracts and all those bases we are building for a war with Iran?
Bush stalls for an election now and the delay will help provide the establishment of castrum and a fortified command and control embassy
Correction > will help provide for the establishment of castrum.
Castra - A Roman legion fortified camp in hostile territory. Fort Apache was an old west castra. From which we get the word castle. As long as we stay in Iraq, we can always go into Iran.
Once we remove this already huge presence in Iraq ...an overseas type of war like with Iran... becomes an impossibility.
"Before trying to answer that, we ought to fire all the current coaching staff."
Bot are you blammit? (Apologies to CS Lewis' "That Hideous Strength")
Don't you mean "shoot" as in "Before trying to answer that, we ought to shoot all the current coaching staff." Or "set on fire" as in "Before trying to answer that, we ought to set on fire all the current coaching staff."
Though a combination of the two is also a possibility, and may in fact be recommended, as in "Before trying to answer that, we ought to set on fire and shoot all the current coaching staff."
I would suggest President Bush's head be therapeutically amputated, since he is not making use of it. Ditto for Vice-President Cheney's ... people should not be forced to carry around non-working organs of that size and that weight. Freedom is a core American value, after all ...
If my representatives won't shut down this disaster, then they need to say no more extra funding! This is your yearly budget for the military, if you need extra for your folly, Mr. President shut down other military projects and use that funding! The governmental department I work for has a portion of the budget (piece of the pie) aimed at "bonuses, awards, and extra pay" that you'all don't even know about. Last year, just where I work, they gave out over 6.4 Million in "extra" pay. Most of the workers didn't get any but by god the administrators did, some more than 25% extra of their salary.