A War Worth Killing For. A Dream Worth Others Dying For.

[ProSense]

A War Worth Killing For. A Dream Worth Others Dying For.

OK, OK, scootch on over and sit around Uncle JP’s feet because he’s about to admit something that he’s perhaps never confessed to in his two decades of life. (I’ve never confessed, even, to occasionally lying about my age.) I can never see The Horsemen without thinking of the terrorist bomb threat I’d egged my friend to make that cleared an entire military base.

It’s one of John Frankenheimer’s lesser-known efforts that starred Omar Sharif, Leigh Taylor-Young and the late Jack Palance although it’ll prove to be timely and remarkably prescient if you stay with me. But back to our terrorist plot.

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George W. Bush, whose murderously fumbling derring-don’t in Iraq and Afghanistan is perfectly symbolized by the very movie I’d been watching in that theater 36 years ago, proves this with perfect certitude. It doesn’t matter that he got all his facts wrong, that things are going south in both countries, that thousands are dying for his messianic dreams of being the Lawrence of Arabia of the 21st century. He meant well.

Now, every dime store psychologist from Maureen Dowd to liberal bloggers have made inevitable and slam-dunk cases about Georgie’s neverending attempts to cockwand with his father’s failed presidential legacy. The Horsemen, which takes place in Afghanistan (including Bagram and the capital, Kabul), is all about a young man’s attempt to prove himself a better horseman than his father. If you’ve ever seen this movie or Rambo III, you’d be aware of an equestrian game called Buskashi in which men ride around with the headless body of a goat and try to drop it into “the circle of justice.”



Bush not only is failing to live up to even his father’s tepid presidential legacy, his own horsemanship, he seems to be avoiding the circle of justice at all costs. The result is brainless, deranged optimism in the face of incontrovertible facts. Increased anonymous Iraqi corpses dug up? Success with the surge! Escalating troop casualties? We got them right where we want them, which is there and not here (again).

And any and all truly unavoidable failures, like bombs going off in the Iraqi parliament’s cafeteria and mortars landing within a hundred yards of where the Iraqi Prime Minister and the new Secretary General of the UN were meeting is the fault of the Iraqi people themselves.

No, it wasn’t me needlessly ratcheting up the terror level, it was someone else. Gee, I’m sorry that things are less than perfect but that’s someone else’s fault.

I had the best of intentions, after all.

Can you throw in a Good-n-Plenty and an extra hundred billion with no strings attached, while you’re at it?

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[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[ProSense]

2. Kick! n/t