Bright sunshine just starting to break the gray this Sunday morning on California’s north coast — dark, heavy-clouded and gloomy a little earlier, but typical for us up here, the scene/sense of the weather can quickly change.
Life on the ocean shore is predictably unpredictable.

So’s life everywhere — the news cycle has become a noise akin to grinding of broken transmission gears, a ferocious, grating-screech on the nerves — especially sharp, nasty clattering from pure-asshole Tony Blair, George Jr.’s bro-mate in psychotic disasters: ‘So it is a bizarre reading of the cauldron that is the Middle East today, to claim that but for the removal of Saddam, we would not have a crisis.’

Just a keynote off Tony’s lengthy bullshit-lecture found yesterday at his website — while this morning the Guardian reported the boy was popping up on UK TV shows to push the shit-pile further away from his plate.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Musician, Dancer, Goat & Bird‘ found here).

However, the bullshit meter will alarm if you have walking-around sense, or better. Blair’s creepy history was perfectly capsulized by Labour’s former international development secretary Clare Short in a right-on quip, ‘who accused Blair of behaving like an American neocon, adding he had been consistently “wrong, wrong, wrong about Iraq.”
She said western interventions created more tension, anger and bitterness in the Middle East, adding the invasion of Iraq “was done in such a deceitful way and with a lack of preparation for what was going to happen afterwards.”‘

And that’s about the whole Iraq quagmire in a nutshell.
Words to that effect — from International Business Times and Iraq War Quotes, mostly blustering and idiot-waving Americans, but also Mr. Blair, July 14, 2004:

“We expected, I expected to find actual usable, chemical or biological weapons after we entered Iraq.
But I have to accept, as the months have passed, it seems increasingly clear that at the time of invasion, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy.”

And the reality of that: “There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”

Hence, one can see it’s not such a bizarre reading to reach an obvious conclusion — the Iraq invasion was one of history’s great disasters, not only as the late, great Gen. William Odom said in October 2005 (via Democracy Now):

I said before the war in February that if we invade Iraq, this will serve primarily the interests of two people: Osama bin Laden, because it will make Iraq safe for al Qaeda, and it will allow him to have access to kill Americans, which he cannot do in the U.S. very effectively; the second party that would benefit greatly would be the Iranians.
Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, and they fought for eight years, and Iranians hated that regime as much more than we did.

Odd, the terrifying, but somewhat predictable situation that’s now building in that most-fertile crescent.