Clueless Irrelevant Apparatchiks

Let’s take a walk down memory lane:

In the 1950s and 1960s the Quiet Americans sent from Langley were warned by the departing French that there was no way to beat back Vietnamese nationalists. Hah! What do the Frogs know, anyway?

Egg dumpling on the face, anyone?

In the 1970s, the Sages of Virginia knew their toppling of the Mossadegh regime in Iran twenty years earlier and their subsequent supporting of the Shah to be a splendid policy with no possible blowback. The poor man is sick? Let’s invite him to the US for medical treatment.

Can anyone say hostage crisis?

In the 1980s the Geopolitical Geniuses of suburban D.C. warned that the Cold War would stretch on indefinitely and that America must increase its ICBM capability and its missile defense system in Europe -- as well as work on its Star Wars interceptors as part of a cosmic dartboard deterrence aimed at the eternal Soviet Union.

Enter Mr. Gorbachev.

In the 1990s, having concluded that history was over and the US had “won,” the Best and the Brightest kicked back a bit, concentrating only on making contingency war plans for whichever country they happened to be misreading entirely. Really, there was nothing to worry about, the forces of freedom, the beacon of liber –

Downtown New York City.

In the 2000s, the Global Experts on the Potomac now knew the score: Arab=Muslim=Terrorist. Let’s bomb as many of them as we can, and, while we’re at it, let’s subject granny to a strip-search at Tulsa International. She could be hiding an Arab… sorry, a terrorist.

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya…

It’s 1848 in north Africa (and elsewhere in the “Arab street,” as it is called in the “overpaid parking lot” at Langley), and what’s on offer from the bloated nationalo-securitamus-intelligenciatic-espionnagery octopus soaking up billions of bucks? Nothing. They got nothing.

Who knew? When they bought the wife a new SUV so that they can both get stuck in traffic going to their super-duper, smart-as-nails jobs as experts on world affairs, there was no app for Al-Jazeera in the beverage center.

You had to pay extra.

Who knew?