The Neo-Con warriors' religion,
impervious to fact and argument.
No 'White Flag' for these unrequited lovers.

by Terry Michael, February 2, 2007

Listening to an NPR sound bite recently from a neo-conservative foreign policy wonk, I wondered to myself: “Is arguing the war with a Neo-Con like trying to talk sense to an unrequited lover, or debating evolution with a fundamentalist Christian?

How can you have a rational discussion with someone whose "views" have devolved to the received wisdom of religious faith? Or the in-denial mind set of a friend who has lost at love?

You can recite a fact base. No weapons of mass destruction. A paper tiger thug, who was Charles Taylor of Liberia, not Osama bin Laden. A Hatfield-McCoy-style tribal culture, with no indigenous interest in pluralistic democracy. No Islamist terrorists, except the ones our elective war attracted. A civil war unleashed by our invasion. Our presence, as in Vietnam, creating chaos rather than ending it.

But those inconvenient facts get in the way of Neo-Con hallucinations. How could you expect anything else from the folks who gave us this criminal mis-projection of American military might?

After all, they sent over three thousand young Americans to their deaths in the desert; physically and psychologically maimed thousands more; killed tens of thousands of Iraqis; destroyed the infrastructure of that country; and squandered hundreds of billions in American treasury.

Just like the best and the brightest of the Sixties, the current crop of American Exceptionalists Gone Wild--in government, in a complicitous "opposition" party, and in a mainstream media that colluded with power instead of challenging it--simply cannot say they were wrong.

They are like the delusional lover in popular singer Dido's "White Flag."

"I will go down with this ship. I won't throw my hands up and surrender. There'll be no white flag above my door. I'm in love, and always will be."

In love with a disaster they created, even if their disaster won't love them back.

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