Bringing it home

Juan Cole responds to aWol's mindless optimism by asking us to imagine America being in Iraq's shoes. An excerpt:

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target "safe houses" of "criminal gangs", but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

Spiro Agnew would have called Juan Cole a "nattering nabob of negativism." Yeah, well, Spiro was an idiot--he sort of combined the towering intellectual presence of Dan Quayle with the sunny disposition of Dick Cheney. Plus, he was stupid enough to get caught!