Obama Spanks His Monkey Lady

In Carpentersville, Illinois, the magnolias may not exactly be made of steel but they come generously festooned with political razor wire as Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski found out. Linda is by way of being a local Village Trustee and obviously moonlights as a neighborhood busybody.

Seeing two local kids playing Tarzan in a nearby magnolia tree, the horrified Trustee, eagerly exercising her Trusteeship, bustled over to the watching parents and remonstrated. The little whippersnappers could get hurt. Worse, they could damage the tree which "is not there for them to be climbing in there like monkeys".

Just another spat with the next-doors except for one small thing. The little whippersnappers weren't Typical Rebukable Whippersnappers. They were African American Whippersnappers and therefore carried about with them secreted in their melanin count the Suffering, Humiliation, Degradation, Discrimination and Torment of Centuries which can Never Be Sufficiently Atoned For.


And so at the very moment the fateful Word "monkeys" was uttered the stars stood in their courses and the planets ceased to spin. The sun dimmed. Nature itself shriveled. Beneath the neat pavements the earth grumbled. The Word took wing and like the Angel of the Lord passed over the whole land. Freeway traffic halted. Workers laid down their tools. Planes made emergency landings on the nearest airstrips. The Stock Exchange stopped trading. Kindergarten children grew still and silent. Captains of industries canceled meetings, withdrew takeover bids, left off ogling their personal assistants. Some even phoned their wives.

A Gay Parade in San Francisco did not end in an orgy. The New York Times hired a real reporter. John Edwards remembered his wife is ill. Bill Clinton made a genuinely innocent remark to a pretty girl. Mitt Romney shot an actual varmint. Office workers in Manhattan threw an estimated 32 tons of specially blackened ticker tape from their windows. Professors on every campus across the country immediately ceased lecturing on "The Evil That Is America: The Jena Six" and announced a new course on "The Evil That Is America: The Carpentersville Monkey Woman".

Levitating in his hotel room as he relaxes between rallies, Senator Barack Obama on hearing the news sighs audibly and mutters, "Another Typical White Person. There are so many of them. So many. And I am so few." On being informed that this particular TWerP was one of his own delegates, the Senator's halo darkened ominously. "Have I not decreed," he thundered, "that those white people on whom I bestow the honor of supporting me must be thoroughly vetted. How can I, I, I say I bring unity to this troubled fragmented sinful land if every one is not of the exact same opinion as I."

"How wise. How true," stuttered his aide. "There's just one problem. This woman is a Latina."

The Senator smiles a cold yet strangely inspirational smile. "Have I not said that any one who is not of my Father's people is of my Mother's people," he says with quiet forebearance. "She is therefore virtually a Typical White Person in everything but the Wetness of her Back which is," he continues, waving an airy palm, "completely irrelevant in this situation."

"Yes, of course," gulps the aide, "and what do you wish to do with this Typical Virtual White Person who has dared transgress?"

Michelle, Revered Consort of the Chosen One, her eyes still filled with the suffering she endured in the cracker hellhole of Princeton, looks up from her copy of Jeremiah Wright's Sermons For Your Children vol. 3: God Damn America and purses her lips.

"Grandmother her," she says.

Obama rises and floats over to his wife, a beatific smile rendering his countenance even more radiant.

"Of course, you're right again, My Sacred Beloved," he murmurs. As he bends down to kiss her chastely on the cheek, the rays of light emanating from about his head cause her to blink rapidly. She suppresses a sigh. A small price to pay, after all.

"Grandmother her?" asks the aide, seeking confirmation.

"Yes," says the Senator, straightening up to his full 12 feet. "Let it be done. Throw her under the bus forthwith."

"It shall be done, Oh Bama," says the aide and scuttles away.

Back in Carpentersville, Illinois, a frustrated Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski turns on her heels and marches back to her house, muttering ferociously to herself about irresponsible parents and spoilt kids. Suddenly with a wail of sirens and the screech of rubber on asphalt she is surrounded by a dozen or more black SUVs from which jump a small army of agents in full body armour with the designations FBI, DEA, ATF, MAD, AS, HELL printed on their jackets. Each and every one of them is a veteran of Ruby Ridge and Waco and so highly skilled in the use of minimum force and the necessity of allowing crass political considerations to ignore common sense and ride roughshod over a citizen's rights.

From the forest of assault weapons aimed at her the flabbergasted Village Trustee sees a tall black man approach. He looks very like the guy who played President Palmer in 24, she thinks.

"Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski," 'President Palmer' intones, "I'm arresting you on charges of being a suspected Typical White Person (Special Designation -Virtual) in violation of Penal Code 666 of the Federal GUMPI Statutes."

"Grumpy?" asks an increasingly alarmed Ms Ramirez-Sliwinski before the breath is driven out of her body as three burly agents slam her to the ground and cuff her..

"G-U-M-P-I," responds 'Palmer' brusquely. "Guilty Until - Maybe - Proven Innocent." Turning to the other agents he barks, "Take her away."

In a flash she's bundled into one of the vehicles and they speed off, sirens whaa-whaaing into the distance.

In his Philadelphia hotel room Barack Obama is doing press ups on the ceiling. "Seven hundred and one," he pants, "seven hundred and two..." The phone rings.

"I'll get it, dear," cries Michelle.

"Seven hundred and three, seven hundred and four, seven hundred and five..." The drops of sweat falling from the Senator's brow form little shining silver pearls on the carpet below before they dissolve and fill the room with the delicate fragrance of lilies-of-the-valley.

In the lead SUV 'President Palmer' speaks softly into his cell phone. "We got her. Everything went like clockwork."

"Good. Good," Michelle murmurs. "The neighbors told me she was weakening. Any day now they said."

"They had her dead to rights. Typical Virtual White Person."

"You said it, bro."

"I dunno, Michelle. One at a time. We'll be at this till the White Sox win the World Series."

"No worries, DooShawen. Remember what the coach told you in college, you win the game one basket at a time."

"Yeah. He was a nice old guy. I feel kinda bad about getting him fired. When he said you'll never succeed without doing the spade work, I don't think he meant any...."

"A Typical White Person. Say it. A Typical White Person."

"A Typical White Person. A Typical White Person. Yeah, you're right."

"You know I am," coos Michelle and hangs up. Obama wafts down beside her, mopping his shining brow with a damasked silk hankerchief, a gift from John Edwards.

"Was that DooShawen?" he inquires. "How'd it go?"

Michelle grins. "Like clockwork." She frowns suddenly. "I know you said for every Typical White Person that's destroyed another ten thousand are scared into silence, but still, as DooShawen was just saying, it seems awful slow."

Obama pauses and looks at her, his dark visionary eyes twinkling. "It's worked a treat so far, hasn't it?"

"That it has, lover, that it has," Michelle agrees and they both burst into uncontrollable giggles.

Standing outside the hotel room door, Patrick Magillacuddy and Sven Olafsson, the two Secret Service agents on duty, look at each other and smile indulgently. It sure is a pleasure to guard such a nice unassuming couple.

The Prematurely Presidential McCain

Below is the new web ad the McCain campaign has released. It's entitled 'Tolerance' and it pleads with us to be...er...tolerant. Of each other. Nay, it urges us to go beyond mere toleration of those who differ with us on the great questions of the day. It is our moral duty to respect each other no matter how profoundly we may disagree.

Right across the political spectrum from Arianna Huffington to Rush Limbaugh we are all sincerely dedicated to the betterment of America, just coming at the issues involved from diverse perspectives. Vigorous, principled but always civilised debate between rational men and women of unquestionable good will must be the order of the day.

Here endeth the civics lesson! Niceness guru Dr. Forni will be chuffed.

What a load of twaddle and what a dreary, dreadful ad. The horse manure piling up here is so fresh if you look closely you can see the steam still rising. It is so much pious nonsense. Tone and attitude in an election are determined only by the cut and thrust of the campaign itself, the pivotal events both staged and sudden, the ebb and flow of support, the attacks and responses, the inevitable October surprise and not by anodyne aspirations that each of our moms will bake equally swell apple pies.

The imperatives inherent in a candidate's overall strategy and the varying tactical approaches that grow from it, some of them premeditated, many made up on the fly, are - or should be - paramount. If gentlemanly discourse works, fine, if not, well so be it. This is as it should be, indeed as it always was. Democracy by its nature is a rollicking robust rambunctious affair and the intensity of the passions aroused are directly related to the importance of what is at stake.

In Presidential electoral politics, apart from George Washington's unopposed elevations, there were no 'good old days' when opposing pairs of bewigged grandees or top-hatted dandies promenaded about the public square exchanging philosophical pleasantries with each other while dispassionate and judicious citizens gravely made their choice between a Republican Kant and a Democratic Hegel!

In every election from John Adam's first triumph to John Kerry's defeat the contending parties all ended up, in Johnny Cash's immortal words, "kickin' n' gougin' in the blood and the mud and the beer". McCain, an irascible and contrary critter, knows this of course and is temperamentally well suited to it. Click the menu button on the clip below and view some of the torpedos his campaign launched broadside against Mitt Romney's Presidential yacht that ended up being all sail and no rudder.

These ads are pugnacious, merciless and bloody. And rightly so. Romney is such a phony he should have gatecrashed the Dems' debates and given those triplets of tendentiousness, Edwards, Clinton and Obama, a real run for their money. Did McCain take the high road when confronted with Mitt's puerile posturing on a par with John Kerry's 'reporting for duty' salute? Did he hell! He tore into the Pro-Life abortion defender and left the life-long rifle-toting gun control advocate as dead as one of his imaginary "small varmints".

The ad is also self-satisfied and self-indulgent and way too wordy. The internet is cheap as spit and encourages verbal and visual flatulence. The voice over is repetitious and quietly hectoring like a Politically Correct uncle telling you not to talk to strangers but to take care not to hurt any leering pervert's sensitivities at the same time. Refuse interaction with a friendly smile before you run like hell away.

In addition to the funereal pacing the visuals are clunky, static, samey and weirdly old-fashioned as if directed by some old codger who cut his teeth on the Donna Reed Show way back when Christian Archibald Herter was Secretary of State. If this is any indication of the dynamism we can expect for McCain's assault on the White House it's gonna be a long long summer and a dismal autumn.

Indeed McCain seems bent on taking the high road, no doubt in contrast to the Dem's daily display of midget mud-wrestling but also - and more worryingly - because it appeals to his inner smug, of which he has more than a wee smidgen. It makes him look presidential but it also enables him to feel presidential. Hence the self-serving magnanimity of the ad. He is graciously exhorting the rest of us to strive to achieve to his high standards.

This is also the reason why he can be so vicious to fellow Republicans but so emollient with Democrats. Indeed the more extreme the Democrat the smarmier the Senator from Arizona becomes. Teddy Kennedy, Russ Feingold, take a bow. Such anomalous and, at times, reprehensible behavior shows his moral superiority to the world but also and more importantly to himself. John McCain is a man who believes he has a lot to personally live up to and he spends much too much time and energy living up to it.

This psychological flaw was the cause not the result of his over-reaction to his association with the Keating Five scandal in respect of which even the New York Times agrees he was completely exonerated. That would be enough for most of us. We did nothing wrong and we were seen to do nothing wrong. Case closed. Not Mac.

The mere breath of scandal about him sufficed to make McCain react as if he were actually contaminated. Like an hysterical bride fixated on some tiny flaw in her gorgeous gown, his sense of immaculateness was violated. His compulsive-obsessive need to reach across the aisle on the most inappropriate of issues was the result. The Maverick of the Senate was born! What better way to display one's sinlessness than high-minded cooperation with the bitter enemies of one's Party and noble, though at times brutal, at times snide, repudiation of one's own colleagues? If this is integrity it has its own peculiar pathology.

Thus the silliness of his crypto-Leftist stand against tax cuts "for the wealthiest 10% of Americans".

Thus his quasi-totalitarian impoverishment of the democratic process with the ludicrous McCain-Feingold Act which in the name of restricting the evil influence on political campaigns of unlimited funds ensured that only multi-millionaires are in a position to even contemplate launching a Presidential bid.

Thus his unlooked for apology on Martin Luther King Day for having opposed its establishment, a strangely irrelevant distraction which is completely superfluous to his current political requirements.

This is John McCain's Achilles heel and both he and we are stuck with it. It is a serious political weakness and it could prove his downfall. Whichever opponent he faces will have at their back the wind leaking from George Bush's tires. Nor, despite the predictable pieties, is there anything remotely gentlemanly or gentlewomanly about either of them.

They both secrete a ravenous ambition in their bodily fluids. They each have no scruples about exploiting, manipulating and inflaming the worst partisan passions of the electorate. They are both past masters at recruiting substantial millions of useful idiots and/or innocents to their 'cause'.

And one or other of them will stand at the head of a chronically failed party which, whenever entrusted with power, has unsurprisingly spawned spectacular failure both at home and abroad with the profligacy that only the congenitally unprincipled can achieve. The last successful full-term Democratic Executive was the Truman Administration and even the redoubtable Harry had the dogs in the street whimpering at the end.

Their last moment of real glory was when the Kennedy brothers faced down tyranny and Nikita Khruschev in October 1962. The surviving sibling is a ghastly measure of the degradation of what was once a mighty, wise and generous political party which in its day nurtured the American melting pot and from it forged a Super Power that kept the world free.

The present Democratic candidates are to their great forebears what Warren Harding was to Abraham Lincoln on the other side of the political divide. JohnMcCain is, I'll hazard, no Lincoln but, as man and politician, he is orders of magnitude both better and greater than those who now face him.

The party which he leads is by orders of similar magnitudes better and greater not only than their domestic opposition but is far and away the greatest and the best on the face of the globe in terms of philosophy, principles and personnel.

For all these reasons Senator McCain needs to do vigorous and unremitting battle against his opponents from now until November 4. Let him quell any neurotic urges he may feel to treat kindly a treacherous enemy simply because they are his the enemy. Let him resist any temptation he may feel to fashion a toothless Presidential persona more aloof than alluring. He need not get down in the gutter with his opponents but neither should he make believe that this will be anything but a bitter, bloody mother of all battles. He is in for the fight of his life and he needs to be ready to throw his best punches "from day one", so to speak.

Then when it's all over he will be in a position to display the only magnanimity that it's safe to show in politics - the generosity of the victor.

The Senator, The Pastor And "The Juice"

In the matter of People of the State of California against Orenthal James Simpson....We, the jury...find the Defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder ...upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being....We, the jury...find the Defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder...upon Ronald Lyle Goldman, a human being....

Thus on October 12, 1995 did a nervous Deirdre Robertson, Clerk of the Court, publish to a bated world the verdict of the jury - also human beings who proved to be all too human - which "set the Juice loose", as the argot of those heady days went. At that moment the great mass of humankind that is the American people split in twain, like the Red Sea at Moses' command, creating an empty arid gulf in between far, far different from the miraculous escape route to the Promised Land which the ancient Hebrews so gratefully crossed.

The African American community performed what black novelist Dennis Williams aptly called "an end-zone dance" of jubilation. The white population just stood there, properly gobsmacked, like a cartoon character who, running straight off a cliff, stops frozen momentarily in mid-air as he struggles to grasp that the once so solid ground has vanished from beneath him. The subsequent fall was from a dizzying height and the impact shattering.

They were appalled at the terrible injustice done to the victims of a brutal butchering, for such it was, and at the witlessness of a jury, each of whom, whenever they opened their mouth, which they did early and often, gave vivid proof that they were suffering from Fulminant Cerebral Pneumonia, a highly contagious condition hitherto unknown to medical science.

It was caused, tests later showed, by exposure to Sequestria Itosiosis Nonomensis and made lethal by opportunistic infections such as Cochranus Racecarditis Blatantioris and the deadly Fuhrmania Furiosa Verbia (colloquially known as Niggra-Niggra) with accompanying hemorrhagic fever.

The prosecutors, Marcia Clarke and Chris Darden, played bumbling, bewildered straight men to the slick comedians on the Defense team while the judge, Lance Ito, perched in cathedra, made like he was auditioning for the title role in a surreal remake of The Wizard of Oz, written and directed by Berthold Brecht, with additional dialogue by Tom Stoppard.

All rational Americans had to deal with the unconscionable wrongness of the verdict but whites in particular were further presented with the explosion of exultation by their African American fellow-citizens more appropriate to a Super Bowl win or an unexpected electoral landslide than the setting free of a brutal double murderer. The black O.J. partisans seemed eager to do a Riverdance jig of joy on the graves of the white victims. Short of an actual lynching this was racial triumphalism at its most crass.

And it is no exaggeration to say that the jury's 'Not Guilty' was instinctively celebrated as a racial triumph despite the universally perceived "whiteness" of Simpson himself. Other blacks saw his life-style choices as a rejection of his own kind, a sin of which he could only properly cleanse himself by the slaughter of two innocent people who deserved their fate solely through their membership of the oppressor race. 'Cynique', a member of Thumpers Corner, a black internet Forum, in a 2006 post states baldly

...the root of OJ's black support was that in spite of his white-woman-loving reputation, he had in a way, redeemed himself with the black community because he had avenged all of the innocent black men who over the centuries had been lynched for crimes against white women that they had not committed; not to mention the Rodney Kings of the world who had been brutalized by the LAPD. tsk-tsk The blind-folded lady of justice may just have got it right.

'Crystal' in response reminisces fondly:

I still get a laugh remembering the faces of the white folks I worked with at the time of the verdict. Mad as hell! Walking around looking like it was their own kids that had been killed. It was hilarious! I had to close my office door so they wouldn't hear me laughing and lynch me or something.

The fact that these are educated members of the middle class with white-collar jobs and not feral, bling-encrusted, drive-by gangsters from the 'hood sends a chill up the spine of all white Americans not already rendered zombies from decades of radical
Liberal brain surgery designed to turn them into Politically Correct dittoheads eager for their own racial subjugation. In other words, Typical White Persons of the Future.

Which brings us to Jeremiah Wright. The road between the Running Back and the Pastor is long and arduous and full of twists and turn, ups and downs, rest stops and diversions, but it is the same road. The same dynamic is in play. The same gulf of moral expectations yawns between the two same groups of citizens. The whites feel the same bewildered outrage, the blacks the same racial righteousness that justifies every thought, word and action, however reprehensible, if conceived, spoken or carried out by a member of the African Diaspora. Reverend Wright's triumphant Return to Chicago as if he were a conqueror of worlds is eerily similar and as dismayingly, disdainfully in-your-face as those tumultuous celebrations of yesteryear.

There are other parallels.

Obama like O.J. is extremely elegant, exceptionally personable and preternaturally charming. Like O.J., pre-Bundy, he strives to be 'postracial', a black man whose blackness is incidental to his life, achievements and promise. He too was coolly regarded, disdained even, by his own - though lionized by everyone else - until he became the butt of white 'aggression'.

Both have been the very reluctant means by which the white population, racially quiescent and willfully determined to see no black evil per se, have been forced to confront the unappeasable otherness of Black America; a place where Johnnie Cochran and Jeremiah Wright and by extension Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Malik Zulu Shabazz and all their unlovely tribe are not perceived as huckstering opportunists blowing smoke to puff up their egos, advance their careers and line their pockets.

They are, on the contrary, respected, even revered leaders not of a few extremists but rather of the multitude of blacks in America at all social levels whose innate hatreds, collective vindictiveness and rampant sense of grievance they correctly articulate and deftly mobilize. Those whom the whites simply tolerate as the price of continuing freedom blacks empower in the cause of ultimate retribution.

Thus white America is beginning to dimly grasp that Jeremiah Wright & Co. are not just a few bad apples but the tip of what is a dark, deadly and very determined iceberg. That Barack Obama is riding this iceberg to the Democratic nomination is now obvious.

What is not so obvious - though now becoming increasing discernible like a great vessel looming out of the fog - is that, after four decades of exercising political power vastly disproportionate to their actual numbers, African Americans have created an African America, a hostile, rival entity that has grown unseen within the regular America to which it is radically and consciously opposed in every conceivable fundamental way and whose very nature it seeks to subvert.

Senator Barack Obama now stands at the head of this African America to which - witness his refusal to "disown" Wright - he owes his primary allegiance and from which he derives his essential world view.

"I had begun to see," he declares in Dreams Of My Father, "a new map of the world....We were always playing on the white man's court...by the white man's rules."

His enemy - as we saw with the O.J. jubilators - is the undifferentiated white race who are made morally indistinguishable by the color of their skin, the cross-burning, nigger-lynching white maniac from Georgia and the loving, politically incorrect white grandmother from Kansas meld together seamlessly to impose a racial oppression, as cunning and subtle as it is comprehensive, upon each and every black.

"Whatever [the white man] decided to do," Obama teaches, "it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning."

This is as complete and as dispassionate an expression of radical black disaffection and resentment as you're ever likely to come across. It also clearly lays the theoretical groundwork for the hostility and hatred to white America that first came to light with the Simpson verdict. When Louis Farrakhan described the white race as the "skunk of the earth" this is what he meant. When Jeremiah Wright spoke of "the U.S. of KKK A." this is what he meant. They both just lacked the necessary analytic skills of their Ivy League fellow-traveler.

Fellow-traveler no more. In all but name Barack Obama is the President of African America.

The decisions we all take between now and November will determine whether he rules it - and the other America - from the Oval Office.

Requiem For The Lot Of Us

Scraps of ancient scholarship
mildew in my brain.
I am Western Civilization.
I jog in the rain.

I am Western Civilization
and I love foreign climes,
pictures with no people,
poems that don't rhyme,
stories with no ending,
heaps of metaverbal fun.
I am Western Civilization
and my race is run.

Casablanca is my movie,
I only groove to jazz.
I am Western Civilization,
I'm not one of the lads.

I accentuate the female,
keep a teddy made of patches,
I weep when I get e-mail,
at earthquakes or cup matches,
I am deeply moved by everything,
sunsets, warfare, pumas,
inflation in the Orient,
and other people's tumors.

I am Western Civilization,
believe in sensibility not sin.
Abort, divorce, screw everyone,
it all helps to keep you thin.

I am Western Civilization,
on the Internet I'll dwell
upon the fax I microchipped
via satellitic cell
to sign up the Tamil Tigers
to play in the NFL.
I am Western Civilization,
and, boy, I'm shot to hell.

I am Western Civilization
I am Politically Correct.
Blacks, gay men, dyslexics,
and those paralyzed at the neck,
and each one with a clitoris,
the many traumatized by Jaws,
shall find me most miraculous
in funding every cause
with money from the white male pigs
who led us from the caves,
painted the Sistine Chapel,
raised the Gothic naves,
wrote Hamlet, Wilhelm Meister,
penned Beethoven's Fifth,
discovered penicillin,
fought at Rorke's Drift,
built bridges, roads and cities,
and walked upon the moon.

I am Western Civilization,
this deadwood I must prune.

I am Western Civilization
I'm having a last fling,
the circumferentially challenged showperson
is just about to sing.

I am Western Civilization,
it seems no time at all
since I saw intriguing shadows
dance on dear Plato's wall.
Still, I had a good long innings,
several thousand years.

I am Western Civilization,
hey man, I'm outa here!


This poem is the copyright of liamascorcaigh (the Author) and cannot be reproduced in any way without explicit acknowledgment. Any commercial use is subject to the author's permission.

Iraq - A Needless War That Needs To Be Won

I have one thing in common with Barack Obama. Back when neither of us was a member of the US Senate we both vehemently opposed the Iraq War. Barack, no doubt, had sound geopolitical reasons grounded in his deep reading of learned foreign policy papers and the wise counsel of experienced diplomats as well as Bill Ayres and Jeremiah Wright hissing into either ear.

I just thought it was dumb.

No, not just dumb. It was sheer madness. Reagan – whom death and Rush Limbaugh have transformed into a mythic figure akin to Moses with a sense of humor – invaded countries. But he didn’t start wars. There’s a difference. The great and good Gipper was a wily old pol, not very Mosaic maybe, but utterly, relentlessly necessary if you’re the leader of a democratic country sending other people’s (i.e. voters’) family members into harm’s way. So he picked small, weak, corrupt countries that no one gave a tinker’s curse about, invaded them, kicked tyrant butt and skedaddled as quick as dammit covered in (Teddy) Rooseveltian glory.

Some good was done, the Munro Doctrine given a timely polish, other tin-pot Napoleons put on notice, troops, highly trained but virgins to combat, blooded. And at a militarily modest cost in the lives of the good and the innocent which is now a matter between the affable ex-President and God into which I am not equipped to intrude.

Compared to the length of skinny string which is Panama and the cuckoo’s spit of Grenada, Iraq is enormous, with a population in the teeming millions and a terrain which even the natives find inhospitable. Saddam was a tyrant with nothing tin-potty about him. The country sat on Great Lakes of oil which guaranteed that everybody on earth had a vested interest in what happened, even Amazonian Indians who have long swapped their paddles for gleaming Honda 4-stroke outboards.

To top it all off the whole region is as volatile as nitroglycerin in a food blender and will continue to be so “till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, and rocks melt i’ the sun”. Iraq in particular is a poorly glued Humpty Dumpty. Hacked arbitrarily out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire its inhabitants owed allegiance only to tribe, clan and sect and in the case of the Kurds to a dream of nationhood. They viewed the sands which surrounded them merely as a handy means of soaking up the blood of their 'fellow citizens'.

This goes some way to explaining why it required a despot of Saddam’s rugged moral sensibilities to bind Iraqis together with hoops of blood and iron. It also more than demonstrates why anybody who gave the question a moment’s thought would expect, no, predict the sectarian, tribal and racial chaos that would inevitably occur once the Fuhrer of Baghdad was eliminated.

The only reason I can think of – apart from rampant megalomania infecting the upper reaches of the Bush Administration – for this misbegotten adventure was a frustration on the President’s part with his father’s refusal to take Baghdad in 1991 and his own determination to finish the job. His expressed desire to spread Freedom and Democracy by armed might is so outrageous as to defy any rational attempt to understand it. And all the talk of WMD was of course purposefully generated claptrap.

The only proper justification for the invasion – as it was for the Afghan War – would have been if Saddam was providing succor to Al Qaeda. In that event all people of good will would have been four square behind the US. Of course bin Laden and Saddam Hussein would have only supported each other in the same way that the rope supports a hanged man.

Unforgivably this terrible war was not planned for. The whole escapade was to be George W’s Grenada, a reprise of Bush pere's Desert Shield triumph. In like Flynn and out like Slim, leaving smiling freedom-loving Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds skipping to the polling booths, fuzzy all over with warm feelings of brotherly love while Iraqi Democrats (symbol: the Hawkmoth) and Iraqi Republicans (symbol: the Dhub-Dhub) thrashed out wonkish policy details and traded barbs over gun control and gay marriage.

The war just happened the way a drunken argument about baseball stats ends up in a lethal stabbing. Unpremeditated mayhem. The military top brass dickered and bickered, the political leadership puffed and postured and all the while Donald Rumsfeld did his Kirk Douglas impression to packed houses of the increasingly disaffected before exiting stage right to a smattering of dutiful applause. It seemed that only the President kept the faith. Perhaps he was the only True Believer all along.

It was John McCain’s finest hour to urge the Surge because however criminally injudicious the Administration was in creating this Gallipoli it is imperative that the US emerges victorious. The country has committed its honor, its power, its standing to the creation of a stable viable Iraqi state free of tyranny and terror. Militant Islam has chosen this as their battleground. This in and of itself has changed the whole meaning of the conflict. What began as willful adventurism has become a strategic confrontation with immense political, security and moral issues at stake for the whole of the Western World. Having gone in America must win.

Despite the Surge, a telling metaphor because surges are of their nature transitory, despite General Petraeus’s upbeat report, despite the very significant decrease in violence, the signs are again ominous. One sign in particular. Last week Iraqi Premier, al Maliki, a Shi’ite, gave in to pressure from the Americans, and decided to confront the Shi’ite militias who control the very strategic city of Basra. These militias, the so-called Mahdi Army, are headed by Muqtada al Sadr, a radical cleric, who has found refuge over the border in Iran. This was the much hoped for battle between the ‘good’ Iraqis and the ‘bad’ Iraqis, a pattern for the future, if the wretched country is to have a future to speak of.

The results are now in. The ‘good’ Iraqis are, in fact, no good. The militiamen are willing to fight and die for their cause. The Government forces, highly trained and excellently equipped, are unwilling to die and therefore willing only to fight as long as they don’t put themselves in too much harm’s way. They have, it appears, no cause worth dying for. Having been fought to a standstill by the militias, they began to throw in the towel. One military source reported that "[a]n Iraqi army commander was told by the local Madhi army commander to lay down all their weapons, surrender all their uniforms, surrender their equipment and then there would be no trouble. The Iraqi army did just that." Striking an ominous note, he added, "we lost Basra faster than we lost Da Nang in 1975".

In order to stabilize the deteriorating situation US commanders sent in special forces and aircraft. A stand-off ensued as the Americans were reluctant to commit enough troops of their own to ensure success, fearing another Fallujah and judging the likely level of casualties unacceptable. On foot of subsequent official negotiations with the Baghdad Government al Sadr has declared a ceasefire. Militiamen already imprisoned by the authorities will be amnestied and released. Al Maliki’s much trumpeted re-occupation of Basra has failed ignominiously. By imposing a tactically advantageous stalemate al Sadr has achieved a stunning strategic victory.

The implications for the future are appalling. The American trained Iraqi troops have proved to be so many paper tigers. The American backed Prime Minister looks like a busted flush. Bush’s – and by extension McCain’s – strategy was aimed at building up a civil administration, capable of winning the people’s confidence and allegiance, buttressed by an Iraqi defense force capable of maintaining law and order and suppressing terrorism. This clearly is not anywhere near accomplished.

An eerie calm will probably now descend on Iraq. In Baghdad al Maliki will continue to go through the motions as will his security forces now that the enemy is on vacation. Al Sadr knows now that each day that passes is his friend. The American public has no stomach for another thousand deaths on top of the four thousand already in their graves. A Democrat may likely be elected next Fall solving the only problem he really has.

Even if the stalwart McCain gets the nod what more can he do to stiffen the spine of the Government side in Iraq? How can it be politically possible for him to continue to supply the wants of his lukewarm allies with more and more of his citizens' lives? The refusal of the US commanders in Basra to countenance the further shedding of American blood is more than a straw in the wind. The example of Vietnam still provides powerful encouragement to those who bank everything on the failure of US resolve.

And Osama bin Laden, untouched all the while by the misdirected bedlam in Mesopotamia, lurks in his wretched cave rubbing his hands and smiling that gentle deadly smile of his.