Hummer

I originally saw this clip on Crooks and Liars.

The clip shows US troops in a Humvee driving through Baghdad.

They are in a rush, their anxiety is something you can feel. They can't really dilly dally as this would expose them to attack, so this presumably is why they rush and speed through the city.

They approach car after car, and force them to move aside by ramming the back bumper. If you have ever experienced this as a driver, you know that this is something that you don't want to have happen. One can easily imagine the people inside of the rammed car being frightened by this, wondering if they will get shot and realizing that they are in great danger.

There is also the sense of entitlement that surrounds the situation. The troops feel they are entitled to ignore the common civility of the road rules, of course they are fearing for their lives simultaneously.

It is that particular mix, superior entitlement and fearing for your life, that is somehow at the root of the whole ugly mess.

You get this also in the sadists in charge, not only the ones visible at Abu Ghraib, but also the ones behind the scenes, the higher ups and the highest ups.

They control and have a sense of superior entitlement and take complete advantage without any civil interaction, but they ultimately are terribly afraid at the core.

At the end of the clip a pedestrian walks across the street, the soldiers see him and exclaim words to the effect, "he's acting like he doesn't have a fucking care in the world." The words speak volumes.

They tell of the projection of fear, and the projection of paranoia. The soldiers project their emotional confusion onto the pedestrian. Why should a simple pedestrian have the level of anxiety and fear that the soldiers have.

In all its a very troubling clip.

As the so called "intelligence" in the run up to war is revealed as nothing more that a house of lies and exaggerations, the public is becoming more and more aware of what was evident at the start of shock and awe to the careful observer.

The Office of Special Plans, run out of the Pentagon by Douglas Feith, was the Office of Special Fairy Tales. The problem is these particular fairy tales are deadly and as poisonous as anything imaginable.

All of the problems still trace back to the neo-conservatives with Bush as the complicit power to activate the deadly plan.

So convinced are these people in the righteous need and unmitigated perfection of their ideology that nothing was going to stand in the way of their plans.

Finally, I have one last thought. As Bremmer was being questioned about the loss of $12 billion dollars in cash (!!!) in Iraq, I recalled the Savings and Loan scandal of the 80s.

Here a group of unscrupulous individuals found loopholes in the federally insured banking rules and regulations that allowed them to bilk the US taxpayer out of billions and billions of dollars and walk away from it without so much as a wrist slap.

Who was at the center of this? The Bush family.