All Your Chaldeans They Must Flee

Oh, goody. We were just having a go at explaining Fox News to some visiting limeys, when who should appear but top 80s Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, to boost the Pentagon's latest plan to win the war in Iraq. This consists of that noted idea whose time has come again - rampant and unaccountable death squads. Ya know, the ones that instilled lasting respect for US values when applied in Central America, and provided very good career advancement opportunities for brave priests whose bosses were shot for sounding a bit like communists.

And it looks like the "El Salvador option" (the nickname helpfully evokes the nun-murdering vibe of the Oliver stone movie), would utilise trained Shiite and Kurdish and peshmerga fighters to "take down bad guys", or kill terrorists, or just take down whatever communists, trade unionists, people with a goat you quite fancy, present themselves to our pet murderers. Fortunately bishops tend to be tad thinner on the ground in Iraq, although it goes without saying that the boor Chaldean ones should probably be even more wary than they've had to be so far.

Yes, we know that making comparisons to Vietnam is considered very simplistic, but when you have flawed elections, meaningless transfers of sovereignty, and then a civil war formed by arming one group of allies and siccing them on your enemies under the guise of counter-insurgency, the parallels become jarring. The weirdest one was Eagleburger claiming that death squads were never really given their due and that the US really should be kicking ass some more, or words to that effect. He had the decency to say "well, I'm not a general" beforehand, but on Fox this signifies the reverse of the intended meaning. What Eagleburger wanted to imply was "you really need a military talking head to flesh out this nonsense." What he meant was "pah, Fox has invited Oliver North and Major Bob Bevelacqua on to peddle revisionist neoconservative nonsense. I, on the other hand, have to pretend to be an elder statesman, so slightly less lunacy from me. But only slightly. I pity you viewers".

Coming up, Wizzard apparently reform at Galapagos.