Blood, Baath and Beyond
This entry takes its title from a Nov. 29, 2003 Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times, in which he announced the winners of his Name That War contest, from the 4,000 of so people who sent in suggestions.
There were duplicates: Bubba’s War, Burning Bush, Bush League War, Bush’s Folly, Iraqgate, Iraqnam, Iraqmire, Operation Quicksand, Shrub’s War, and The Crawford Conflict apparently arrived by the hundreds. Bushkrieg and Operation Bushwhack Iraq were along the same lines.
Then the true jokesters, one of America’s enduring strengths, got to work. Kristof said he didn’t see why anyone would suggest that Operation Iraqi Liberation should replace the official Operation Iraqi Freedom, until he realized the three initial letters were O.I.L. Another wit suggested Mother of Oil Wars.
There were names that could have titled bestsellers: Bush’s Botch, The Iraq Preemption, The Big Uneasy, The Bush Incursion. One was Biblically literate: Visit Scenic Sodom and Gomorrah. Popular culture, that favorite topic of angry ayatollahs, irate imams and moralistic mullahs, suggested others: Apocalypse Right Now, Mission Implausible: A Job Well Spun, Operation Kick the Dog, Operation Oops, We Did It Again, The Empire Strikes Out, and Trek 2: Wrath of Neo-Khan. Someone familiar with The War of Jenkins’ Ear chimed in with The War of Bush’s Flight Suit, and another offered The War That Cried Wolfowitz.
King George’s New Colony, put in a history buff. Others tapped English history for The Charge of the Right Brigade and The War of the Roves. Vermont’s own Donn Blodgett put together a sophisticated French pun: Coup d’Etats Unis, that wrongheaded country’s name for us being Les Etats Unis (the states united).
Wrapping up the contest, awarded Honorable Mentions to A’bombin’nation, Desert Storm und Drang, Iraq: A Hard Place, Operation Unscramble Eggs, The ‘Raq, Tigris By the Tail, and War of Mass Deception.
The winners, who got 250 dinar notes with Saddam Hussein’s picture on them from Kristof’s last trip to Crisis and Cruel Fates (there’s my own entry, belatedly) were, in the order that he listed them,
--Dubya Dubya III
--Rolling Blunder
--Desert Slog
--Mess in Potamia (Vermonter Will Hutchinson)
and
--Blood, Baath and Beyond.
That was nearly four years ago. As someone who was draft age during the Vietnam War, here are four ways in which this conflict and that one resemble each other:
--We patrol, they ambush, and our soldiers come back crazed.
--They are willing to give their lives, but our allies aren’t (unless they’re fighting each other).
--It drags on and on and on, against all reason, burning up our resources and threatening to leave a legacy of problems as difficult to solve. (Did you know that to finance Vietnam we had to raise interest rates to attract foreign capital, thus increasing the burden of Third World debt payments, thus inspiring the Oil Producing and Exporting Cartel, whose price hikes devastated us in the 1970’s?)
--What would fill the streets with protesters, and possibly bring this wretched affair to an end, is an incursion into another country like Nixon’s crossing of the border into Cambodia (that and the Kent State killings inspired the “Kentbodia” mass demonstrations and other actions). The national consensus would be “Stop him. Stop him before he does something even worse.”
This administration has already brought us a Blood Baath (Saddam’s party was the Baathists); now it’s time to make sure they don’t go Beyond.
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