Simplicity

Y'know, it's really kind of frightening to read someone whose view of the world is so dogmatically simplistic, so utterly black & white, so completely devoid of any shades of grey. Back during college, I was rummaging through the library to find material on the French Revolution. I found a book by an elderly aristocratic lady who blamed the revolution on various bad people. It was the fault of this scheming person and that bad person and that awful person. She had no thouught that perhaps the French peasants had real and serious grievances against the French government, no thought that perhaps the French people had reason to be dissatisfied with the way they were governed.

Bush demonstrates no thought that perhaps the Arab people of the Mideast might have grievances against the Israeli occupation of land that belonged to the Arabs a few decades ago. He has no thought that perhaps the American occupation of Iraq, the complete failure of the US to raise living standards even up to where they were in February 2003, the chaos that never fully stopped since the "Mission Accomplished" speech of May 2003 and has gotten considerably worse since then, the US Army that is apparently roaming about, abusing Iraqis at will everywhere they go, it never occurs to our President that perhaps Iraqis have some very real and serious grievances against the US.

As to the very real complications that Bush seems determined to ignnore:

Juan Cole points out that there are four distinct wars going on in just Iraq simultaneously:

1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland

2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south

3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war

4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).

It's very difficult to square this description with Bush's assertion that: "Isn't it interesting, as a democracy takes hold in Iraq, that Al Qaida steps up its efforts to murder and bomb in order to stop the democracy?"

Well, it would be interesting, if al Qaeda had any serious presence in Iraq. I would point out that the death of that e-e-e-villl mastermind Zarqawi doesn't seem to have caused even so much as a blip in the violence in Iraq.

Also, an excellent overview of how the White House's simplistic view of their opponents has served to undermine it's credibility.