Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

I suppose that, as this piece in today's NY Times says at one point, "the change in tone is welcome." But WeaselCo is so stunningly late to the party, so breathtakingly audacious in their switching of story lines, that it's hard for me at least to applaud their newfound common sense objectives:

Senior officials say the intelligence reports flowing over their desks in recent months argue that even if democratic institutions take hold, the insurgency may strengthen. And that possibility has created a quandary for an administration that desperately wants to equate democracy-building with winning the war, but so far has not been able to match the two.

[...]

Mr. Bush's own way of talking about the future, in Iraq and beyond, has undergone a subtle but significant change in recent weeks. In several speeches, he has begun warning that the insurgency is already metastasizing into a far broader struggle to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia." While he still predicts victory, he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions.

Let's think about this. According to the adherents.com religion-statistics site, there are currently around 1.3 billion followers of Islam. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no consensus on what percentage, on average, of this 1.3 billion total are "radical." But every one percent of this figure is 13 million people; even half of one percent is still over 6 million. What The Weasel is apparently arguing is thus that (say) 6 million people, spread around the world, are to be the target of our worldwide March to Freedom. Heck, make it 13 million.

And how many people is 13 million people? A lot, right? Well, umm, no.

To wage a war on 13 million people is to bring the full weight of the US military to bear on any one of the following countries: Chile (15,980,912), Kazakhstan (15,185,844), Cambodia (13,636,398), Burkina Faso (13,491,736), Ecuador (13,363,593), Malawi (12,707,464), Niger (12,162,856), Zimbabwe (12,160,782), Guatemala (12,013,907). (Source: IDB -- Rank Countries by Population, US Census Bureau, Population Division, Internation Programs Center.) This is ridiculous at both extremes, as well as anywhere in the middle:

1. The US waging war on Malawi?!? Are they kidding?
2. How in the hell are we supposed to fight a war against 13 million people spread across, oh, say, 50 countries?
   

I remain an optimist in one respect: At some point the senselessness of the whole enterprise will start to sink in, if not among those who wage war ostensibly on behalf of US interests, then among the electorate. I don't expect any actual bloodshed to result, but it has all the earmarks of a metaphorical bloodbath in the making.