The Five O'Clock Memo

What with the humiliating "leak" of a patronizing memo by one Stephen J. Hadley on the eve of yet-another photo-op summons by Deputy Dubya Bush to his bad puppet Nuri al-Maliki -- a.k.a., the Mayor of Baghdad's Green Zone Castle -- I thought I would write a memo of my own to America's memo-leaking foreign policy "elites." Perhaps I should call it:

"The Five O'Clock Memo"

To whores it may concern,

You continue to unconsciously project America's domesitc political dilemma (what H. L. Menken called "the strife of the parties at Washington") onto foreign disptutions having their own particular (and opague to Americans) dynamics. In so doing, you overlook the central, gargantuan similarities between "The Best and the Brightest" (who brought America self-defeating quagmire in Southeast Asia) and "The Worst and the Dullest" who have brought America even worse at greater fiscal cost in even less time in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American military-industrial bureaucracy could intervene in the internal affairs of Martians and it would make the same soup sandwich, i.e., FUBAR and SNAFU, out of whatever it touches. Naturally, self-interested defenders of this fuck-up-and-move-up rampant military careerism and domestic political fascism protest the comparison, noting correctly that Martians breathe Carbon Dioxide while the earthly Chinese, Vietnamese, and Iraqis breathe oxygen. Or, as my fellow Vietnam Veteran Daniel Ellsberg says about those distinctions without a difference between Vietnam and Iraq: "Yeah. Like in Iraq its a dry heat, and the language our diplomatic and military personnel don't speak is Arabic instead of Vietnamese." See all those "differences"? See? See?

In fact, one of the biggest and most driving of all similarities among the various discredited American post-colonial misadventures has to do with the way American political-military bureaucrats substitute Orwellian mixed metaphors and flawed figures of speech for the rational thinking and clear, expository writing that would lead intelligent people not to ever do in the first place what they so manifestly cannot do -- and never have done -- successfully. Yet still we hear of the Pentagram planning to offer Americans yet another Hobson's "choice" of dead horses to beat in Iraq, just as long as we "choose" the only unmoving horse lying dead just inside the stable doorway.

So look for Deputy Dubya Bush to "go big" and/or "go long" staying the curse for the next six critical months with the tipping point turning the corner connecting dots with the ink stains on the flypaper dominoes in the tunnel at the end of the light. In Vietnam, we used to call this Pentagram briefing: The Five O'Clock Follies. See all the differences between then and now? See? See?