Continual War

It is said that the world is divided up into two types of people: those who believe in the conspiracy theory of history and those who believe in the "fuck-up" theory. I tend to belong to the latter camp, as it allows one to chortle at others' screw-ups: the former leads to paranoia and night-sweats, and life is just way too short to be one long bad acid trip.

So the story running on all the web sites today about nearly 350 tons of explosives missing from a military complex in Iraq, and the fact that it went missing during the looting for liberation rave in US controlled territory, comes as no surprise: to me, a massive SNAFU, perpetrated ultimately by the Administration in attempting to stage an understaffed occupation: imperialism with tax cuts, if you like.

But if I were in the the camp of the wild-eyed, the situation might start to look very different. It goes like this... Perhaps the foremost duty of a government running an occupation is the protection of its own forces, and an obvious place to start would be to secure potential weapons caches to deny the insurgency access to them. But what if the goal was to extend the insurgency to last past the US elections? Perversely, the Administration can argue that (1) Bush is the more decisive War President and (2) it would be dangerous to change horses in mid-stream in any case. And as the well-founded charges of incompetance seem to be falling on stony ground, then actually running the war badly = running the election campaign well.