I’ve gone back and forth with Syl Jones in this space for pretty much as long as I’ve had a blog.  As I’ve noted in the past, I probably disagree with Jones 80-odd percent of the time.  But even at his worst, at least he’s always written his own stuff. 

Not so much with his latest piece in the Strib, which is enough to make you wonder if he spent too much time “consulting” and writing plays to get to his monthly column, forcing him to dig through his “in” box and find something, anything to write about, leading him to an envelope full of Code Pink talking points or Nick Coleman’s liner notes.

No, really; see if you’ve seen this before:

The winner of the Most Arrogant Nation In The World award is clearly the United States of America. We are arrogant in our dealings with sovereign nations like Iraq. We are arrogant toward our own citizens. We are arrogant in assuming that we have a special place in history. We are arrogant in believing that all nations want and need our kind of democracy. So, let’s all reach around and pat ourselves on the back. We’ve won. “Arrogance Is U.S.,” and the whole world knows it.

Seriously!  Deja vu is setting in!

We insisted on putting our massive footprint in the heart of the Middle East, where we don’t belong. Arrogance.

Er, yeah.  We just felt like going there. 

Like, nothing else happened.  It was the national equivalent of a 50 year old mortgage broker buying a Miata. 

Nothing else to it. 

We lied to the world about WMDs,

…in the same sense that Syl Jones “lied to the world”  about the psychology of Christmas.  

Of course, perhaps Mr. Jones would say he wasn’t lying, merely operating from information that he “reasonably” believes to be correct? 

We told the world that we were fighting them “over there” so we don’t have to fight them “over here.” More arrogance.

Um…huh?

We sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan without the needed armaments and equipment.

So badly armed and equipped were they that they did in a month what the Soviet Union couldn’t do in a decade.  So ill-equipped, they advanced a thousand opposed miles in three weeks.

Jones is wrong – or, to use his “logic”, lying. 

Far from following the advice of those on the ground, as President Bush has repeatedly claimed, we ignored and vilified Gen. Eric Shinseki for saying that we needed at least 250,000 troops to stabilize Iraq.

Shinseki was likely wrong; we didn’t need more troops, we needed to employ the ones we had there better.  As we are doing now.

But it’s perhaps unfair to hold Jones too closely to his words on a subject he only dimlly comprehends (or, to use his own logic, “is lying about”). 

Everywhere we look in this war, the United States is on the defensive not because the enemy is overwhelmingly strong but because we were unprepared. Now, the president has announced modest troop withdrawals in order to buy time for himself and for his failed policy of converting Iraq into a democracy on the backs of American soldiers. No, scratch that. The goal keeps changing. We’ll settle for a brokered cessation of hostilities between the rival militias and movement toward a functional coalition government. Absolute arrogance.

Also known as “realism”. 

Suddenly that’s a bad thing?

Furthermore, we have no intention of leaving Iraq — ever. We are building the largest embassy in the history of the world in Baghdad. We will maintain a military foothold there even after the militias have been subdued because our geopolitical interests are underneath the ground: oil. With friends like us, who needs enemies? We pedal arrogance 24/7 — it’s who we are.

Yeah.  Ask the Germans.

Actually, keep the Germans on the line; Jones is straying onto their turf:

Finally, the misappropriation of language, a hallmark of totalitarianism, is another sign of our arrogance. Starting now, I’m taking the language back from its abusers.

Oh, good.  This oughtta be fun.

 The “surge” is an escalation of an ill-fated, badly planned and executed war.

It’s a change in approach to the war – one we should have undertaken years ago.   

“Vietnam” is a war we fought to prop up an anticommunist dictatorship, and it took over 50,000 American lives. “AWOL” is where Bush resided during part of that war. “Five deferments” refers to Dick Cheney’s ticket out of the Vietnam War. And “Mission Accomplished” means we didn’t do our homework. The fact that we do not seem to grasp these concepts does, indeed, make us look like the most arrogant nation on earth.

 If that assessment proves to be true, then the outcome will be more tragedy, less safety at home and abroad, and a resurgence of international scorn.

“Syl Jones recycles rewarmed MoveOn talking points” equals “national arrogance”?

Way to take that language back, Syl. 

Syl Jones, of Minnetonka, is a journalist, playwright and communications consultant.

And, apparently, desperately short of ideas.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.