The latest installment in my series of Jill Nelson fiskings continues (see here and here).   In her current OpEd on MSNBC, it seems that all the progress in the war has left Jill feeling a little down.

After most of a life spent as an information junkie, I find myself these days avoiding American news. Every day since the Bush administration invaded Iraq in the name of the American people, my connection to what passes for news in the USA has been steadily fading.

Memo to Jill:   It's not your connection to American News, it's your connection to American people and geopolitical reality that has been steadily fading.  Predictably she blames the newly conservative media establishment and it's arm chair quarterbacks productionizing the war into Monday Night Football.   Despite her disbelief in the media, she does apparently believe in it enough to conclude that the battle is dragging on, that shock and awe have failed, and that the comman man in Iraq is fighting for Saddam and against the consumer/military/industrial US machine:

...I learn little news and I am not interested in the grim details. I never believed the Iraqis would lie down and surrender their country in the face of America’s “shock and awe” military strategy, so I am not surprised at the rising death toll on both sides and difficult battles.

...Nor am I shocked or surprised by the emergence of Iraqi suicide bombers and civilian resistance, or by Iraq’s guerilla warfare strategies as they fight off the U.S.-led coalition forces. It can be only racism, arrogance and simple stupidity that made any one think they wouldn’t.

I wonder if Jill would allow us to say it's "racism, arrogance, and simple stupidity" that made it OK to militarily intervene in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia to secure some thread of liberalism + democracy but not Iraq?  What words do we apply to her when she sees the war as a simple "white people of America" vs. "the brown of Iraq" with no distinctions made between the opulent lifestyles of the Baathist butchers, the centuries of torment faced by the Kurds, the genocide of the Marsh Arabs, and the systemic repression of the Shia throughout the country?

Does she have the slightest idea what writing something like this would have done to her if she lived in Iraq?  

But for Jill, it has nothing to do with the precepts of liberalism and democracy.  For her, these values are far too abstract to intersect with the physical reality of Force.  Like a true PostModernist, she sees this as entirely about Power seeking more Power and thus she doesn't need any news input to sway her from the O-I-L thesis:

...I think the arrogance of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and all the rest of them so bent on this war for oil is itself simply a posture — a cloak to convince Americans to go along with a war that would be quick and virtually painless, with few casualties and over in a few days. If so, it was a lie that only the United States, Tony Blair, Spain and Bulgaria believed.

Well, at least she doesn't think we're entirely unilateral anymore  ;-)