Seventeen!

Seventeen! That’s assuming that none of the angels is obese by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services standards and that the pin head has not been hammered into a wider platform than Bureau of Standards tolerances permit. Now that we’ve settled that age old conundrum, maybe we can address the pressing issue on our national agenda: is Iraq now in a civil war?

This morning, Tony Snow can be seen pouring over Webster in a hundred snapshots posted in dozens of newspapers as he rails, “Is not!” The Los Angeles Times, NBC, and a sizeable portion of the media scream back in unison, “Is too!”

Across the country, we’re being treated to a medieval fest to determine for all time just who is responsible for what happens in Iraq. The White House is leading the charge that Iraqis are in charge of their destiny and even Democrats are joining on the side of the president. Carl Levin of Michigan and dozens of others are screaming for air time with their versions of the `Iraqis are going to have to stop the sectarian violence or call a halt to their civil war.’ We gurus of the Middle Ages just haven’t heard enough of these arguments to establish with finality just what kind of a fray we’re in over there.

In today’s Washington Post, Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University takes this question and dozens of related ones and boils them down into a renaissance style cut through the baloney opinion. We’re in the beginning stages of a national search for `who lost Iraq?’ As we prepare to bug back out of Baghdad, the fig leaf de jour that the president is holding to hide his imperial nakedness is that the elected Iraqi officials are going to have to wind up without a chair when the music stops.

I’m with Carl and the Dems in agreeing with the president. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to provide the kid with an escape route. The president’s latest truism is that al Qaeda is behind the sectarian violence (or civil war). I have no idea if that’s correct or not, but is this something the president should be really spouting? Al Qaeda is, according to the president, our mortal enemy and what would a normal person expect from such a source? Mass surrender maybe? The crazy thought that ran through theologically challenged brain was, “Isn’t this kind of like blaming the Nazis for the Battle of the Bulge?” It’s what they do. You have to wipe them out. Or rather, the Iraqis have to kill them all.

It appears that we’re assembling everyone who had anything to do with Iraq – Iraqis, Americans, neocons, Don Rumsfeld, the CIA, Dick Cheney and thousands of others - and organizing them in a huge circle in the Pentagon parking lot. When everyone is posed and pointing in both directions, then from the roof we’ll snap the group shot of who lost Iraq. It’s kind of like the old Miller light beer commercial in which great big former football players traded the shouted bards, “Less filling!” and “Tastes Great!”

But we careful medieval theologians will ponder this for years on end before we get to the `seventeen’ of this great question. Only then will we pronounce the final answer. (But I‘ll let you in on a secret; the answer to who lost Iraq is George Herbert Walker Bush.) President Bush 41 by failing to topple Saddam during the Gulf War laid down an irresistible challenge to George W. Bush. “You can’t top me, ever, twerp!” Daddy made him do it.

You read it here first.

Blog on!

Wild Bill