It’s moments like these that I can tell I’m growing up. The same ice storm that has been keeping us indoors and isolated from the world at large struck again last night with a vengeance, and the city of Austin has pretty much shut down.

In other words, I have a snow day.

I remember that when I was a kid, I loved snow days. An unexpected day off from school was like Christmas … well, not Christmas in July, but you get where I’m going with this.

As a grown-up, however, I’m actually irritated about the day off because I’m under several deadlines that aren’t going to get moved just because the University of Texas has closed down for the day.

There’s a publisher in Minnesota waiting for me to get back to her with edits on someone else’s book manuscript (unfortunately – since I’m only the content editor I can’t rewrite the whole thing, which is what I’d really like to do), and I feel really stupid telling someone in Minnesota that I can’t send her the edits because they’re on my office computer and the entire city shut down over a half inch of ice. Back Where I Come From, they don’t even blink at a half inch of ice. (Of course, the problem is that they don’t blink at it here, either, which is why there will inevitably be numerous pileups on the freeway today.)

And tomorrow, I’m actually supposed to be standing in the cold encouraging students to spend June in Morocco with me and distributing a brochure with all of the information … and said brochure was supposed to be completed and printed today. And it’s on the designer’s computer, so even if I could somehow avoid the Texans who don’t know how to drive in ice and get down to my office, I still wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

So, I’m probably going to wind up doing the same thing I did yesterday: sitting on my butt and watching television half the day. Over the course of the past three days, Ray and I have watched the season premiere of Rome (because it’s just not Sunday night if no one is having sex in front of the slaves), finished the first season of Torchwood, the BBC sci-fi series that recently featured The Gay Kiss Heard Around the Blogsphere, and the second season of nip/tuck.

Speaking of nip/tuck.

One of the main characters in nip/tuck recently had her breasts augmented in the second season of the show. I sort of sat up and took notice of this phrase because it was the same thing that Condoleeza Rice said last week about the new troop deployments to Iraq: we’re not escalating, we’re augmenting.

Naturally, I found this disturbing because there is very little (if any) redeeming social value to nip/tuck and it’s quite disturbing to hear U.S. foreign policy being presented in the same exact language as a boob job breast augmentation. (I will admit that it might have been the slightest bit easier to swallow if Condoleeza Rice looked like Julian McMahon).

If you were living under a rock last week and need a refresher, Adam (“This Boy Elroy”) has an excellent recap of the main points as presented on The McLaughlin Group in one of his recent podcasts. I didn’t see the episode because I am forbidden to watch programs like McLaughlin and Meet the Press, as they tend to send my blood pressure into orbit, after which Ray has to spend the rest of the day scraping me off the ceiling. Also, the sound of The Deciderer’s voice makes me break into hives, a rare talent once possessed solely by Celine Dion.

Hence, most of the analysis that I have done of the Deciderer’s speech and its aftermath on the Hill has come from NPR or the print media, because I can get up and walk away from the print media when my eyes cross and my hands start to shake because this is all so ridiculous.

The Iraq Study Group says that we should keep troop levels as they are. The Deciderer and Friends decide to send in more — without an actual plan of action, too. Apparently just having 20,000 more young men and women on the ground in Iraq will send the insurgents running for the hills. Kind of like how the presence of American troops was supposed to cause the Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam in 1992.

The Iraq Study Group says that we need to reach out to Iran and Syria. TD&F decide instead to isolate both countries further, and to keep poking Iran with a stick. Anyone who knows anything about Iran knows that the Iranian government loves to play the role of the Anti-America (not anti-American — although they usually are — but what I mean is that they like to be our foil, our nemesis. It gives them a raison d’etre). The way to deal with Iran is to make the Iranians look like the unreasonable party, which thus far we haven’t done. As long as we keep up our tradition of not talking to people we don’t like, they can keep acting like we’re being the playground bully.

It is, as Maggie Thatcher would have said, a higgledy-piggledy mess.

See, unlike some others out there, I’m not convinced that there’s still a victory to be had in Iraq. Unfortunately, it is now imperative that we reach some sort of conclusion in Iraq because otherwise the dissolution of Iraq will spill over into every other country in the region and we’re going to be dealing with the results for generations, not just years.

Which makes it completely unsurprising that Egypt has jumped on board and supports the troop augmentation 100%.

I have fond memories of a late evening sitting in Newark Airport with Kamran, waiting for our flight to Paris and then on to Cairo, watching Anderson Cooper on the CNN Airport Network live from Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut. Cooper, in that sexy/serious way that he has, gravely informed us that “democracy is on the march in the Middle East.” This was the spring of 2005. Rafiq Hariri was dead and the Lebanese were pissed about Syria’s involvement, and the population mobilized because they wanted him out.

At some point, the Dominatrix Secretary of State went on a tour of the region and landed in Cairo and issued a thinly veiled warning that Egypt had better jump on the democracy train if it wanted to keep securing vast amounts of U.S. aid. And so, for the first time in decades, President Mubarak took the unprecedented step of actually allowing someone to run against him as president. Of course, it was all a farce – in order to register as an opposition candidate you had to have the support of a number of members of parliament that well exceeded the number of opposition members of parliament, so the ruling party basically got to approve all opposition candidates. And, after much nail biting and down to the wire election campaigning, Mubarak won the election with over 90% of the vote. Washington beamed happily, Cairo patted itself on the back for a job well done, but no one was the slightest bit surprised.

And now that we need Egypt – the most populous country in the Arab world – to back us on our recycled strategy in Iraq, all talks of promoting democracy in the region have completely ceased. It seems that after the elections in the Palestinian territories that were won by Hamas, and the elections in Iraq that installed a prime minister we really don’t like that much, Washington has decided that maybe this just isn’t a good time to try to shake things up after all.

And so, we stay the course, plow ahead, try a new strategy that no one wants to admit looks exactly like the old one. And by the time we start to notice that it isn’t working, it won’t be the current administration’s problem any more.

The more things change. The more they stay the same.

Tags: Arab-World, Austin, cairo, conflict-resolution, current-events, egypt, foreign-policy, iran, iraq, mubarak, nip-tuck, politics