Missing things

This is a game called Spot the Lost Dimension. Timothy Garton Ash on the Bush speech:

Consider. Three years ago, when the Bush administration started ramping up the case for invading Iraq, Afghanistan had recently been liberated from both the Taliban and the al-Qaida terrorists who had attacked the US. There was still a vast amount to be done to make Afghanistan a safe place. Iraq, meanwhile, was a hideous dictatorship under Saddam Hussein. But, as the United States' own September 11 commission subsequently concluded, Saddam's regime had no connection with the 9/11 attacks. Iraq was not then a recruiting sergeant or training ground for jihadist terrorists. Now it is. The US-led invasion, and Washington's grievous mishandling of the subsequent occupation, have made it so. General Wesley Clark puts it plainly: "We are creating enemies." And the president observes: our great achievement will be to prevent Iraq becoming another Taliban-style, al-Qaida-harbouring Afghanistan! This is like a man who shoots himself in the foot and then says: "We must prevent it turning gangrenous, then you'll understand why I was right to shoot myself in the foot."

In short, whether or not the invasion of Iraq was a crime, it's now clear that - at least in the form in which the invasion and occupation was executed by the Bush administration - it was a massive blunder.

Got it? If not, I'll give you a clue. It's in the simile, 'like a man who shoots himself in the foot'. Before, you see, there was a healthy foot; after, it's a matter of preventing it turning gangrenous. From good to possibly very bad. Spotted it now? Yes, Garton Ash does the throat clearing, 'hideous dictatorship', sentence. By the time he comes to the pay-off, though, and with the help of his little simile, he only has two options for us: crime or blunder. Nothing about the release from decades of murderous tyranny.

No worries. It's just another morning, another 'liberal' Guardian opinion piece. (The decades of murderous tyranny don't show up too clearly or too often on the anti-war radar, because of what being against the war implied about the life-span of that tyranny.) And it's part of that paper's response to the Bush speech, the response it merely began yesterday, and has built on (in spades) today.

While I'm on Lost Dimensions, I'll also throw in this little gem from Garton Ash:

One is still gobsmacked by things American Republicans say. Take the glorification of the military, for example. In his speech, Bush insisted "there is no higher calling than service in our armed forces". What? No higher calling! How about being a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, an aid worker? Unimaginable that any European leader could say such a thing.

I, too, have the highest regard for what doctors, nurses, teachers and aid workers do. However, Garton Ash must have overlooked the fact that, in what they do, soldiers sometimes give their lives, and on behalf of others like him and me; or he wouldn't have implied that theirs must be a lower calling than all of these. If it's really true that no European leader could say what he here wonders at, this would be Europe's problem.