Name Games

NP: Stone Temple Pilots, Thank You (CD)

I think this qualifies as more of a political "ramble" than a "rant," but a bunch of this has been bouncing around my brain for the last couple of days.

At several points since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I was willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on knowing something that I didn't that made the pre-emptive strike more justifiable. When I saw a headline over the weekend touting an al-Queda member actually being a lieutenant of Saddam, I had two thoughts. First, that maybe Cheney actually is privy to something the media has been unable to shed light on. Second, why is this only coming out now?

The news story said they only just found the connection, which would make the smoking gun decidedly less smoking. Still, maybe they were right. You almost have to hold out that possibility, that the surface appearance is just a media-inspired hack, like the notion that former President Clinton, who I think may have a book out, fired a couple of missles at bin Laden to distract attention from, um, internal affairs. Turns out this bin Laden was worth shooting at.

Now it's coming out that the claim was entirely full of shit. The alleged al-Queda operative was really a weather balloon station. Or something like that. I don't think this is the bit the administration was hanging it's hat on, but it's looking more and more like the emperor's new hat every day. And it looked a lot like that in the beginning. E.J. Dionne sums it up pretty well in today's Washington Post.

In other news, the vehemently pro-Bush crowd loves pointing to the despicable spate of beheadings as evidence that we're doing the right thing, but how many people were beheaded on Arab television before we went into Iraq? There's a weird upshot here, though, at least in the case of Paul Johnson. If roiling al Queda gets them to brazenly commit acts of terror in places that are nominally our allies, like Saudi Arabia, it may actually force those states to finally lift a finger and really help. To me, this is one of those sort of oblique strategies, in the non-Eno sense, of the whole endeavor. Kick the hornet's nest so hard that everybody has to start fighting hornets lest they get stung. Unfortunately, and this is small consolation to the families of the victims, the sting is fatal, and there are a lot of hornets buzzing about.