While I was getting my daily dose of snark over at Sadly No, I followed a link to this rather long Esquire article on Admiral William Fallon. He's been commander of US Central Command and a thorn in our preznit's side for almost a year now, and rumors are flying that he's about to be prematurely put out to pasture for being insufficiently bloodthirsty. His public refusal to pound the drum for war with Iran is making darth Cheney's pacemaker overheat. Check it:

...it's left to Fallon--and apparently Fallon alone--to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict . . . is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

See? That's seriously off message. Fallon is a salty old warrior, but an honorable one. He assesses the threat too honestly, refusing to help the preznit and his neo-con handlers paint Iran as an imminent source of nucular terra that must be dealt with immediately. It's tough to build a sense of urgency for attacking when the man who would be running the attack keeps saying the threat is negligible:

"Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

Admiral Fallon seems to think armies are better for making peace than war. And since dubya likes to claim he listens to his commanders on the ground, Admiral Fallon has got to go, so he can be replaced with a commander that dubya can claim to be listening to when he starts teaching those pesky Iranians a thing or two. They are brown, you know. And Muslim. Evil. Besides, he's not really dubya's kind of guy anyway. He's a thinker:

"What I learned in the Pacific is that after a while the tableau of failed, failing, or dysfunctional states becomes a real burden on the functional countries and a problem for their neighborhood, because they breed unrest and insecurities and attract troublemakers very well. They're like sewers, and they begin to fester. It's bad for business. And when it's bad for business, people tend to start restricting their investments, and they restrict their thinking, and it allows more barriers, so we're back to building walls again instead of breaking them down. If you have to build walls, it means you're moving backward."

If you have to build walls, you are moving backward. A future administration could build it's entire foreign policy around those words and do our country proud. But not this one. This one would insist that in order to keep Amurka safe and support the troops, the preznit needs the authority to award no-bid contracts to build the walls in question. Sigh.