Spoken Words: Diplomacy Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it…. (Will Rogers)

I was actually looking for a similar quote from Ambrose Bierce, but this one will do nicely.

I write this as we make our last swirl around the bowl, about to be sucked inevitably into the sewer of war. I thought it appropriate to give credit to the turds that got us into this mess, the diplomats, the world leaders, the national leaders.

But, I can’t help but start with Saddam Hussein. The guy is shitbag among shitbags. I am sure there are worse people in the world, but few of them command the resources of this one.

Of course, Saddam couldn’t have done it himself. Its hard to know where to start, so I’ll start with Bush and his administration. Rather than giving the UN enough rope to hang themselves as negligent dabblers, he took the rope and hung the US instead.

There was a strong case to be made that the UN isn’t the sole path to multilateral legitimacy, just as there was a strong case to be made that the UN’s own legitimacy in multilateral matters is not well established (years of knee-jerk soviet vetoes, failure to act in Bosnia, soft peddling with Israel, failing to do anything credible in Iraq since the Gulf War, etc.) They didn’t make that case. They paid lip service to “a coalition of the willing” while putting all their public efforts into forcing the issue with the UN. As expected, it didn’t work out very well, and now here we are we look like a petulant child who has just carried through on his threat to take his marbles and go home. Just the thing to inspire support in the people of the world.

What a mess. Truth is, most of the parties probably agreed more than they disagreed, and yet it has ended up as this colossal clusterfuck.

There is more, of course, but I don’t have the energy to do them up right, not right now anyway.