No, really.
That's the argument. For my readers who don't know the columnist, Shelby Steele is a conservative black man. Yeah, there are some very twisted people in America.
Billmon sums up the situation nicely:
So, short of using WMDs on Anbar Province, or turning the Sunni quarters of Baghdad into modern-day versions of the Warsaw Ghetto, it's not clear what kind of "military professionalism" would make our home front field marshals feel happy about the war again. I mean, the real generals have tried massive search-and-destroy sweeps, mass arrests, "oil spot" pacification campaigns, surrounding entire cities with barbed wire fences, clearing others (Fallujah and Tel Afer) block by block, selective bombing, precision bombing, revenge bombing. We've had Marines go house to house killing everyone they find. We've dropped 500 pound bombs in crowded urban neighborhoods, we've shot people (lots of people) on sight for driving too close to military convoys.
You have to wonder how much ferocity the Shelby Steele's of the world would need to see before they'd accept that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have put their white guilt behind them.
I think what's happening here isn't so much a credible demand for genocide as it is a fairly desperate attempt to think up an excuse for the Iraq fiasco -- one that doesn't involve admitting the invasion was a really stupid idea, stupidly executed. As a way of rationalizing defeat, it's a direct descendent of the post-Vietnam argument that our boys were forced to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, because LBJ wouldn't invade the North or nuke Hanoi. (Conservatives, like the Bourbons, learn nothing and forget nothing.)
The ability of the war mongers to blame everyone and everything save themselves for the disastrous conditions in Iraq is equalled only by their overwhelming fiath in mass murder as a civilizing influence. They should read their Conrad more and learn the final lesson.
Mistah Kurtz, he dead.
Anglachel
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