Wednesday, September 20, 2006

It's puppet rotation time

8 comments:

Mr roT said...

Nostalgic for the good ole Saddam days, Pepe?

The Darkroom said...

well, not quite but you'll have to admit that your intervention didn't exactly improve things.

The Darkroom said...

come to think of it, the US should appoint longer-lasting puppets. There are only so many incompetent politicians that can take this job before Sadr does.

Tecumseh said...

I sometimes wonder what it would take in the Pepean worldview for a politician to be "competent". We need some concrete examples, as a yardstick for the definition. We've heard paeans to Castro and Chavez. Anyone else? Kim Il Jong, perhaps?

Could it be that, in this view, "competent=reliably Lefty/Commie", "incompetent=complementary set"?

The Darkroom said...

ok how about "achieved stated objectives" for a metric?

Ooops. Nope. That would make dubbyah incompetent.

How about beats chest and waves flag ?

The Darkroom said...

AI - So what do you think of success in achieving stated objectives ? Is that pinko-birkenstock rhetoric too ?

An interesting 3-D representation could involve succcess, time and cost as the three axes (even though time and cost are obviously not orthogonal).

So the iraqi adventure whose stated objective was to establish a stable secular democracy in iraq would be little to no success, long time (> WWII), huge cost. Function value there would be near to complete failure.

Democracy spreading throughout the middle east ? That would be similar outcome, mitigated by success with Khaddafi. Does a D- sound fair ?

Tecumseh said...

So the iraqi adventure whose stated objective was to establish a stable secular democracy in iraq would be little to no success, long time (> WWII), huge cost.

First, that was only one of stated objectives. The other was to whack Saddam (for playing footsie with AQ, posing a danger to us and to others, etc). We did pretty well on that score, thank you.

Second, when it comes to nayional survival, cost and time is no issue -- man gotta do what he gotta do to stay alive. So one cannot put such simplistic metrics in these situations. Put another way, the metric is not smooth, when Zarky puts the knife to your throat. It's do or die, man.

The Darkroom said...

You indeed defeated the remnants of Saddam's army. congrats: david doesn't always win.

national survival ? so tony was right and the mesopotamians were 17mn from the gates of the city ?