Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for December 07, 2011

Is the captain telling her to get ready to fight in Iran?

You think we haven’t been?How…quaint.Orion

She’s so sensitive about those things …

On a completely unrelated note, it’s the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and I didn’t see one cartoonist mention it. It’s times like this that I start missing Charles Schulz.

In this strip Trudeau is exposing the hypocrisy of proclaiming false objectives, as Bush-Cheney-Blair did. An example of a false objective would be the removal of “weapons of mass destruction”, which Colon Powell told the UN were “around Baghdad”. But when our armed forces discover that this was a false objective, the administration has to CHANGE the objective. In one case, Bush’s pet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began ignoring the original false objective for a new false objective — that our troops were actually “spreading democracy” in a bad area of the world that needed it. The new mantra: WIPE OUT THE BAD GUYS so that the Iraqi’s can vote, etc., and set up a new democracy in the region. To help in this new false objective we would “nation build” — spend $$ billions building schools, roads, bridges, electric power stations, etc. Nation building that should rightly be used at home in the USA, and not wasted overseas. But when the new false objective also failed, as today’s strip revels, then Trudeau has Roz “awakening” to the top-down deception upon our troops in battle AS WELL AS on our citizens back home. Thus Trudeau slowly, methodically, and humorously exposes the “false new objective”. The blond-headded captain is cynical about the false new objective and tries to “blame one of the victims” — Roz herself — by putting the excrement back on her — “Don’t take it so personal, specialist.” So not only is he dumping blame, he’s talking down to her: “captain” over “specialist”.

Seems like they can’t hit the broad side of a barn,

The collaborators of the occupation must be sweating blood now. There’s an entire town called “Traitor Town” whose occupants are now marked for liquidation by the resistance, and are aware of it. They were happy working for the Empire all these years and now claim they’ve been betrayed. Tough sh*t. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who’d collaborated with the occupation has it coming.

Has anyone read “Fall of Giants” by Ken Follett? A novel full of info on events leading up to WW I. These days it’s like deja vu all over again. We haven’t learned diddly squat from history.

I’m shocked Gasoline Alley didn’t, since some of its characters “served” in WW2.

GT is always eager to propagandize for those who rule by apartheid — now it’s Iran that’s the enemy. The apartheidists and their puppets in Washington are flying high, aided by toadies like GT

So, how much oil did we get from Iraq?

Has no one noticed that the "BOOM"s in each strip this week are getting progressively larger? Check back on Thursday, and buckle in for Friday’s strip. RIP, Mel.

This is something of a delayed follow-on to DTpi’s earlier talk of false objectives. There is a great irony in the objective of “spreading democracy” in the Middle East. Back in the 1950s, Iran had just democratically elected a new president. The only problem was that American intelligence told our President (Eisenhowwer) that he was really admiring the Soviets. So what happened? We had the CIA take out this democratically elected president and put a ruthless monarch, the Shah of Iran, back in charge. We know how well that worked out what with the eventual Islamic Revolution.The law of unintended consequences really came into play here. Our irrational fear of those “Commies” helped to eventually ignite the whole Middle East region into the Islamic fervor we see today. Face it, American foreign policy is hypocritical at best.

One of the biggest strategic difficulties for anyone invading Mesopotamia/Babylonia/Iraq . . . and this was true for the Akkadians, Assyrians, Romans, Ottomans, and British . . . is that your occupying forces in the flat Tigris-Euphrates basin are perpetually open to flank attacks from the high ground of the Zagros mountains – from the Kassites, Parthians, Persians or Iranians.This was the main reason Bush 1 stopped the attack on Hussein in 1991. He wanted to leave Hussein too weak to threaten neighbors, but strong enough to hold the Mesopotamian basin against the Persian high ground.I still can’t understand how Bush 1 could be so knowledgable of geopolitical history, and yet the son be such an idiot. The Iranians were guaranteed to “win” the Iraq war from the moment we marched in, in March 2003.

“Grand Avenue” mentions Pearl Harbor.

GBT clearly timed this strip to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day. The fact that so many commenters miss the connection between that attack and 9/11—-and that they forget the surge of patriotism that both events spawned—-shows how easily our historical experience gives way to myths about Tojo and Bush-Cheney.Roz tries to voice that patriotic moment, while her captain, whose cynicism readers seem to find cool, is oblivious to the ongoing international threat. Like most Americans, he probably couldn’t locate Roz’s base in Afghanistan or analyze the Islamist designs there.

You are one verbose character. Do you do anything else?

Sorry, I laughed at the ‘toon as when a buddy took a round creasing the top of his helmet in ’Nam, I told him, "Don’t take it personal". HIs reaction was “interesting” but then faded to a lot better sense of humor than most responders to the ’toon.

btw, the drone lost in Iran was a piece of junk the Air Force didn’t really trust, or want. Starting a new war with Iran is also something anyone with a brain doesn’t want, but right-wing saber rattlers, are clanking the pipes again, from the depths of their bunkers.

“Bush1’s Secretary of Defense, one Dick Cheney, apparently knew more in 1991 than Bush2’s VP, one Dick Cheney, did in 2003.”Yes. That is interesting. Many people have commented on “how Cheney has changed”, esp. people who worked with and under him in both 1991 and 2003 . . . http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/powell-chief-staff-col-larry-wilkerson-cheney-fears/story?id=14414226#.Tt_PF3rntc8

“It was wrong to go to war … without ever debating what could happen if they took a baseball bat to a beehive.” -Maureen Dowd, NY Times

To me the captain is either trying to be calm and cool under pressure by appearing to be nonchalant, or he’s nonchalant because the tranqs are starting to kick in and is keeping everything smooth and manageable. At any rate his leadership training tells him, “his calmness will be contagious among the troops” … if only he had more quaaludes.