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Narcissism. Wolfowitz's stubborness is especially tawdry. A fittingly craven end.

His Neocon cohorts rally still to his futile, rictus smiles and grip on status. Another Neocon romantic obsession with “Last Stands”. And beyond the '300' current pop sensibilities of Miller and Snyder's silliness.

Wolfowitz, like Sampson, would rather pull it all down around him. Neocon love affairs for such narcissistic heroics run throughout their historical revisionism. Varus, November 1942 (which is especially perverse for obvious reasons), Masada, Wagner's stuff (again, perversely, in that way), Dien Bien Phu, the Shia in 1991, the Kurds, etc. Many Neocons we know go bonkers for the movie ZULU. (We've never met one who gives a shit about Custer. Too much 'Americana' for their tastes perhaps. Comment, below, also reminds us the Alamo is absent from their litany).
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* 'Lupus Maximus' — another gem from the fertile mind of Comment, friend of all here at the Stiftung.
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Pity the fools? Nah.

U.S. diplomats are returning from Iraq with the [allegedly - ed] same debilitating, stress-related symptoms that have afflicted many U.S. troops, prompting the State Department to order a mental health survey of 1,400 employees who have completed assignments there . . . State Department employees in Iraq seldom leave the capital's heavily fortified Green Zone . . . Diplomats might be suffering PTSD to the same extent as troops, says Joseph Boscarino, an expert on war-related mental problems at the Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa.

We don't make light of the dangers of Iraq or the courage of those there. The idea, however, that those State Department and other USG personnel hunkered down in the Green Zone share the same levels of stress and trauma of the men and women serving in the meat grinder in the rest of the country is ridiculous. Of course, Cher Condi's bogus AgitProp scheme of sending Foreign Service officers outside the Green Zone in Condi's Provisional Reconstruction Teams is lunacy. It's no wonder Condi and Karen Hughes can't find the volunteers for that farcical assignment other than the young, ambitious and perhaps naive new FSOs. Even then, not without lavish bonuses and other incentives.

Surge, indeed.





Tags: Iraq, Neocons, War, Surge, Condi, Condi Rice