Diaphanous curtain draped over the statue of what?

I hate this; God I hate this. But I don’t have any longing for normalcy, as Noonan put it the other day, because normalcy was a delusion, a diaphanous curtain draped over the statue of Mars. Nor do I want a time out, a breather, an operational pause. I want to cut to the chase. I want Iran in the hands of its people and leaning to the West again, I want Lebanon independent of Syrian rule, I want Syria isolated and cowed, Arafat dead and buried in the land of his birth – or Paris, symbolically – and the Saudi Civil War done and over with pragmatists in power. I'd like this all tomorrow please.
 
Noon is fine, if it works for everyone else.
 
More proof that James Lileks is the Bernie Goetz of the Internet.  Trouble is, even if James' paranoid fantasy were to come to pass (I love his description of our disaster in Iraq as "an operational pause", as if we're just a few reinforcements away from marching on Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh), he wouldn't be a whit safer.  Al-Qaeda can operate from Minneapolis just as easily as it can from the Middle East, which is why a military solution to the threat of terrorism can't and won't work. 
 
Don't you understand, Jimbo - it's our pathological inability to leave the Arab world the fuck alone that got us into this mess.  Why is it that knee-jerk conservatives hem and holler about the futility of "social engineering" here at home but are more than willing to engage in it abroad, and at great taxpayer expense to boot? 
 
Just because you and your friends spent the first forty-odd years with your head up your ass didn't mean all of America did too.  Some of us knew damned well what our country's been up to around the planet, and how it tends to piss people off.   And I'm not just talking about liberals.  Some of us always knew there wasn't any such thing as "normalcy", that the "diaphanous curtain draped over the statue of Mars" was a fantasy that people like you who wanted to have his cake and eat it told themselves because they didn't want to hear the truth, that the world is an unjust ugly place where - as Thucydides so rightly pointed out 2500 years ago -  the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must.  We didn't end up on top because of our inherent goodness, Jimmy.  We're number one because we perpetrated some seriously heinous shit over the centuries.
 
For some people, this is a terrible thing;  for others, this is a wonderful thing - in truth it's the same thing, which is why the Greek world deinos can mean both the former and the latter.  To be perfectly honest I can respect the viewpoint of either camp - the ultraviolet Left and the ultraviolent Right - but I have no time for people who pretend that this isn't how things are, that we don't have so much blood on our hands that it would take a whole lot of scrubbing to get ourselves clean, that somehow we are good and noble and fundamentally wholesome living in cities and towns we actually had the balls to name after the people we systematically slaughtered.
 
That we were somehow innocent before the events of 9/11.
 
Get a fucking grip, James.  The world was never safe and it never will be, although by learning to cooperate with the other civilized nations of the world instead of pretending we can tell them all what to do we might just be able to make it a bit safer.  But that won't happen until we jettison the cult of wounded naivete that willfully ignorant blowhards such as yourself have been nursing since even before September 2001.  We weren't angels then, and we sure as Hell aren't angels now, but that isn't to say we aren't incapable of doing actual good in this world.   Contrary to Anne Coulter and her McCarthyite ilk, we on the Left don't hate America;  we simply want it to live up to its promise, at long last.
 
And it starts with putting down the gun, Jimmy.