Why didn't the Bush administration go public with this sooner? What fun is institutional psychosis if one doesn't strut one's demented selves all the way? What good is a ravingly mad monarch if he suppresses the best of his raving madnesses?
I speak, of course, of the White House's most recent unmitigated incoherence -- the one about Iraq being molded along the lines of the "'Korea model,' a reference to the large American presence in South Korea for the 54 years since the armistice that ended open hostilities between North and South."
It seems that for some time the executive asylum's chief occupant has been rambling privately about this model during visiting hours. One can easily imagine the observers' gapes of incredulity, and that George II mistook these looks for admiring awe.
In time, it further seems, the Boy King became so impressed with his magnificent intellectual feat that he decided he simply must share it with the world, this being fitting and proper, and this he has now done.
Last week Tony Snow got the green light, and it was about time. He "publicly reached for the Korea example in talking about Iraq," saying "Korea was one way to think about how America’s mission could evolve into an 'over-the-horizon support role,' whenever American troops are no longer patrolling the streets of Baghdad."
Mr. Snow garbled his metaphor, for quite obviously he meant to say "over the rainbow," but I doubt the regal Wizard noticed (the garbling came around feeding time), and the gaggle was just as obviously too busy gaping with abovementioned incredulity to call him on it.
Within 24 hours Defense Secretary Bob Gates piled on, also raising the specter of a Korean Iraq, saying "a long-term American garrison there was a lot smarter than the handling of Vietnam."
This is an old rhetorical trick that became a humdinger of outmoded tricks once Bush & Co. released the 2003 Iraq model. There was a time when any half-witted foreign policy proposal could be floated credibly and realistically as long as it was "smarter than Vietnam," which naturally characterized any proposal, no matter how cracked.
But, as referenced, that was before Iraq. The worst-possible-comparison bar has been lowered -- way lowered -- and Mr. Gates' failure to comprehend this new reality is testimony to the power of blinkered institutional delusion.
The news piece quoted above was swarming, as one would expect, with counter-perceptions of domestic horror at the Korea-model "idea." I won't regurgitate them here. They would occur to a six-year-old. But my otherwise favorite entry was this: "Nor is the idea popular in the Middle East."
Translation: The Middle East's precise reaction has been memorialized in that "You want it when?" cartoon.
But in answer to the lead question -- Why didn't they go public with this sooner? -- I can happily report that I have no earthly idea. I say "happily," because I'd be seriously distressed about my mental status if I started pre-tracking the inner thinking process of the executive asylum we know today as the White House.
