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Everyone knows the old Marxist cliche that history is repeated first as tragedy, and then as farce. But in the case of the much-heralded Cold War: The Sequel, history is being repeated not as farce, but as farts. And as everyone knows, farts are nature's way of saying "There's too much shit backed up in the system... Must evacuate! Must evacuate!"

Which leads us to this scatological-metaphor payoff: When it comes to the Big Alarmist Story on Russian-American relations, nothing is so totally full of shit as the alleged Cold War sequel.

Some folks might be terrified by a pile of shit this high and foul, but we're professionals here at The eXile. That means when we see a big steaming pile of geopolitical bullshit on our front lawn, we don't run away screaming. Rather, we want to investigate it, understand it, really get inside the shit's mind, find out what makes it tick, perhaps even mate with it if the situation requires. Our methodology for understanding the shit is that of a scientist's: first, we stand around pointing at it, giggling. Once it stops being funny - which it never does - then we can get down to cold observation. Yes, that's when we take a stool sample of all the bullshit, analyze it, and give you, the reader, the results, so that you can sleep better at night.

For this issue, we're looking at the Ten Biggest Pieces of Cold War Bullshit. So put on your latex gloves, hold in your gag reflexes, and let's git analyzing.

STOOL SAMPLE #1:

The Hawkish Western Media's Cold War Decoy

Fred Hiatt et. al.: "Hey, let's talk about Russia."

Analysis: On August 1, 2002, The Economist magazine published its now-infamous editorial, "Iraq, America, and the case for war." Between December 2002 and January 2003, the Washington Post published nine pro-war editorials on Iraq. Newsweek, Fox, The Weekly Standard all competed with each other to see who could pound the pro-war gong hardest and loudest. Then a funny thing happened. The war turned out to be a complete and total fuck-up, the worst imaginable follow-up to the successful 2001 campaign in Afghanistan: it was the geopolitical equivalent of Pink Floyd's The Final Cut. Imagine if that album was put on repeat over and over and over for four straight years. It was and is such a royal disaster that even the Post's opinion page editor, Fred Hiatt, confessed, "If you look at the editorials we wr[o]te running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction. If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." Indeed.

How to get rid of the awful smell of your media outlet's outrageous war crimes? Easy: kill the smell of Iraq failure with the odor of Cold War-Sequel bullshit. These days, the Economist, the Post and Newsweek are all desperately trying to pretend that they really weren't all that pro-Iraq War in the first place, or that it was the right war done the wrong way, and... Oh, hey! What's that over there?! Why, it's a New Cold War! Wow, do you see what we see? No, stop looking at Iraq, look away from that and look at that big Cold War II thing on the horizon. It's really, really scary. Don't believe us? Well, it's true. The West is threatened again. Phew! Do you think they fell for it, Anne? Yeah, I think they did...

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