Hornet analogy posited

A commenter on Tim Blair’s thread dealing with Shankar Vedantam’s ‘hindsight bias’ piece has devised a really neat analogy with which to frame the Iraq debacle:

I like to think of the terrorism in Iraq like this:

Iraq was a hornet’s nest. America and her allies came and poked the nest with a stick.

The problem isn’t that the nest was poked. The problem is that the nest was full of hornets.

Posted by scooper on 2006 10 03 at 01:58 AM

I think I’m getting this: Terrorists are like hornets. As such, they tend to collect in hornets’ nest-like places such as Iraq. Therefore, it behooves tough little yobs with big sticks to poke said sticks into said nests, and...

Where does crap like that come from? It’s too tempting to see that kind of thinking as an atavism of someone who sadly spent a large slice of their childhood performing wanton and arbitrary acts of violence, like poking hornet’s nests with sticks.

More broadly, this kind of thing demonstrates a more general principle: That expressions of clueless desperation, such as Vedantam’s piece, inexorably elicit further expressions of clueless desperation, in ever descending blurts of stupidity and irrelevance.

Apology: I take this opportunity to express my regret at having wasted my time and yours, dear reader, by giving all this more than a moment’s consideration,