Too much has happened

in the world over the past week for me to make a meaningful commentary on all of it, but the gist of it is simple: it is becoming ever more obvious to the average American that the Bush Administration doesn't know what the fuck it's doing in Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter. From an almost pathological insistence to turn over civilian authority in Baghdad to an entity yet to be announced in less than two months to an endorsement of a Middle East "peace" proposal that undermines the past forty years of American foreign policy towards Israel and its illegal settlements, the Bushies seem hell-bent on making some awful decisions for the planet in order to game the table as best as possible for the upcoming elections in November.

Let's start with Iraq. If the goal of the Bush/Cheney administration is in fact a "stable and democratic Iraq", as they claim, then sticking to a cut-and-run deadline of June 30 seems a little pennywise and pound foolish, even from the point of view of the Karl Rove Spin Machine (insisting that the Bushies stay in Iraq to their obvious political disadvantage is a cheap shot for the opposition party to make - of course they should remain, but if the positions were reversed the Dems would be scrambling to get out by the Fourth of July as well). The problem with the June 30 departure is that it is in fact a sham exit - only the civilian administration is being returned to the Iraqi people, whereas the United States will continue to control the country militarily. And yet the Bushies are going to play up this transfer with as much pseudopomp and circumstances as they did with the whole "Mission Accomplished" event that they staged a year ago, as if by telling the Americans that our job is done in Iraq that magically they'll stop asking questions about the continuing violence and all of those dead and wounded soldiers coming back in a steady stream. Have they learned nothing? Never mind the fact that to turn sovereignty over to a power vaccuum is an invitation for a bona fide civil war. Well-meaning fools on the Left are making too much of the Bush Administration's push to have the United Nations return to Iraq after June 30. The U.N. has already been targeted by the Iraqi insurgency, and there is no reason to hope that it wouldn't become such a target again if it agrees to take the bloody reins of occupation from Paul Bremer this summer. A foreign occupier is a foreign occupier is a foreign occupier, and by the time we're done with them the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds will never want to see an outsider's face again, no matter how good his or her intentions may be.

And now Israel. By endorsing the new Sharonista plan of "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip, the Bush Administration has for the first time put an American stamp of approval on Israel keeping its settlements elsewhere for good, a radical departure from decades of official U.S. policy that puts the Palestinians and the Arab World into a real Kobayashi Maru - accept a peace plan that will screw them, or be labelled enemies of peace once and for all. Now I am all for the defense of Israel. The Jews have known collective suffering on a level that most of us couldn't even begin to imagine, and insofar as the State of Israel can be a haven for the persecuted, I support such an idea. It profits the Israelis not at all however to indulge in questionable tactics to this end, and it speaks volumes that the current occupants of the White House have yet to call Sharon's government on its unacceptable behavior in Israel's own homegrown War on Terror. I have always said that the chief struggle of the 21st Century is not a "Clash of Civilizations" made popular by historian Samuel Huntington but that of civilization versus barbarism. The attacks of September 11th weren't so much a declaration of war (as they're so often made out to be by those who profit from war) as an invitation to respond to a barbaric act with barbarism in return. Until the bombs began to drop on Baghdad, we had resisted the bait; now we have surrendered the moral high ground we used to enjoy by using an international tragedy to go after an uninvolved nation, just as Israel squanders whatever sympathy it might otherwise garner from terrorist attacks on innocent civilians by bulldozing tenements and resorting to assassination.

The moral equivalence game cuts both ways: conservatives accuse liberals of making the terrorists too rational to be properly demonized as an enemy should, but the Right falls into the same trap by suggesting we fight terrorism by committing acts of terror ourselves. There is only the moral high ground in a conflict such as this - nothing else matters. Should we stoop to behaving like barbarians in our quest to save Civilization As We Know It by employing collective punishment, utilizing the killing of civilians as a strategy of "shock and awe", and abrogating civil liberaties here at home, then what exactly have we preserved?