Despite the cosmetic acts of Bush, his undertakers and enablers, America's Iraq is still a corpse.

[marmar]

from The Nation:



comment | posted January 18, 2008 (web only)
CSI: Iraq
Tom Engelhardt


The other day, as we reached the first anniversary of the President's announcement of his "surge" strategy in Iraq, I found myself thinking about the earliest paid book-editing work I ever did. An editor at a San Francisco textbook publisher hired me to "doctor" god-awful texts. Each of these "books" was not only in a woeful state of disrepair, but essentially DOA. I was nonetheless supposed to do a lively rewrite of the mess, after which another technician simplified the language to "grade level," and a designer provided a flashy layout. Zap! Pow! Kebang!

Back then, in the early 1970s, an image of what I was doing formed in my mind--and suddenly came back to me this week. I used to describe it this way:

Our little band of technicians would be ushered into a room at the publisher's in which there would be nothing but a gurney with a corpse on it in a state of advanced decomposition. The publisher's representative would then issue a simple request: Make it look like it can get up and walk away.

And the truth was, that corpse of a book would be almost lifelike when we were done with it, but one thing was guaranteed: it would never actually get up and walk away.

That was a minor matter of bad books that no one wanted to call by their rightful name. But the image came to mind again more than three decades later because it's hard not to think of America's Iraq in similar terms. Only this week, Abdul Qadir, the Iraqi defense minister, announced that "his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq's borders from external threat until at least 2018." Pentagon officials, reported Thom Shanker of the New York Times, expressed no surprise at these dismal post-surge projections. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/engelhardt