Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Empire Burlesque on Bremer's memoir:
[hat tip: A Tiny Revolution]
In the time-honored fashion of bootlickers everywhere, Bremer hastens to heap praise on Bush personally – saving his ire for well-placed barbs at the murderous incompetence and bureaucratic hugger-mugger of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and other masters of disaster. Yet at the same time, the hapless viceroy is desperately trying to signal that the final responsibility for the FUBAR fiasco lies with the dimbulb in the Oval Office. It's not my fault, Bremer screams through the lines on every page: I vas only following the orders of mein Fuhrer!
There is of course an egregious amount of butt-covering in all of this. Bremer presents himself as a gosh-darn good egg who just wanted to do what's right but ended up as the tragic victim of vicious circumstances. Yet the fact is that Bremer played a key role in creating those circumstances, and at every point assidiously carried out his primary duty: laying open the ruined nation to the rapacious appetities of Bush's corporate cronies. He is, to put it bluntly, a war criminal like the rest of them, although he would perhaps be ranged with the second tier of defendants in that new Nuremberg Tribunal of our dreams.
But even butt-coverers can tell the truth – inadvertantly, letting bits of it poke out from behind their comfy quilt of rationalization and justification. And Bremer's hissy fit confirms once more that the ultimate responsibility for this illegal invasion of Iraq – and all the stomach-churning horrors that have followed in its wake – does indeed lie with the tinpot tyrant in the White House: George Widowmaker Bush.
[hat tip: A Tiny Revolution]
