The "awfuckit" administration

Numbered nights in Damascus
Originally uploaded by vegacura.

I have no wish to give the impression that I am an admirer of the Syrian government, but looking at this picture of an evening in Damascus, with couples together (male and female, no less), I am reminded once again that the Cheney administration knows nothing about the societies they are trying to destroy in order to bring about what they blithely call "a new Middle East."

The very people whom the United States wanted to encourage to promote democracy from Bahrain to Casablanca instead feel trapped by a policy that they now ridicule more or less as "destroying the region in order to save it."

Indeed, many of those reformers who have been working for change in their own societies -- often isolated, harassed by state security, or marginalized to begin with -- say American policy either strangles nascent reform movements or props up repressive governments that remain Washington's best allies in the region.

"We are really afraid of this 'new Middle East,'" said Ali Abdulemam, a 28-year-old computer engineer who founded the most popular political Web site in Bahrain. He was referring to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statement last month that the situation in Lebanon represented the birth pangs of a "new Middle East."

"They talk about how they will reorganize the region in a different way, but they never talk about the people," Mr. Abdulemam said. "They never mention what the people want. They are just giving more power to the systems that exist already."

His plight is shared by reformers across the Arab world.

Fawaziah al-Bakr, who promotes educational change and women's rights in Saudi Arabia, helped organize women to protest the Israeli attacks. "Nobody is talking about reform in Saudi Arabia," she said. "All we talk about is the war, what to do about the war. There is no question that the U.S. has lost morally because of the war. Even if you like the people and the culture of the United States, you can't defend it."

The statement by Ms. Rice -- during a fleeting stopover in Beirut last month -- is being juxtaposed with the mounting carnage to rally popular opposition against all things American.

In Lebanon, Israel continues bombing despite the fact that the violence could destabilize the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, elected last year in a vote that the United States hailed as a democratic example for the Middle East. Iraq was the previous such example, reformers note bitterly.

But who fucking cares? God told George that it takes a lot of broken lives...er, eggs...to make "a new Middle East" omelette.

"At some point, we may be the only ones left," Bush told his closest advisers, according to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. "That's okay with me. We are American."

A messianic simpleton following a neoconservative road map for societal upheaval in a part of the world he knows nothing about. Who will survive this madness?