I'm naming the next cat 'Iraq'

Recently, I gave up my efforts to housebreak a local stray cat that Lisa and I had been feeding. These efforts have come to naught and we have released the cat, Lil' Bit, back into the wilderness of suburban Hyde Park. My reflections on this failed effort and the hubristic assumptions underlying the effort have led me to some loose parallels with the hubristic invasion of Iraq.

To start at the beginning I began this cat-taming venture on faulty intelligence. My neighbor told me about Lil' Bit, and how he was a stray cat that she and the previous neighbors on her other side had been taking care of and intimated that Lisa and I could take up primary care for the cat and maybe even adopt it. After feeding the cat for awhile we got our neighbor, who had sufficient rapport with Lil' Bit, to pick him up and bring him into our house. The first two times when our neighbor tried to do this with Lisa in the house Lil' Bit squirmed away, so the third time Lisa and I left the house while our neighbor went in. The intelligence would prove to be faulty because regardless of whether or not our neighbor regarded Lil' Bit as her cat, Lil' Bit regarded himself as belonging to her.

Our neighbor succeeded in capturing Lil' Bit within our house. This 'success' was one which drew my attention to the Iraq analogy. I had advocated for the idea to Lisa and our neighbor that if we just brought Lil' Bit into the house that we would be able to tame him. I turned out to be very wrong and it reminded me of the Iraq war plans, which seemed to be that if Saddam was removed from power the rest would follow. There is wonderful military adage that "The enemy gets a vote." I neglected the possibility that Lil' Bit might become the enemy in much the way that the Bush Administration ignored the idea that the Iraqi population, or at least a substantial proportion, would become the enemy.

As to the cat-based insurgency, it turned out that Lil' Bit had little interest in being social, and would mostly hide under the bed or sofa or other corners of the house. He only came out when he thought Lisa and I were asleep or not paying attention to try to escape through closed windows, or cry about it. Also, he sometimes would come out to eat and this provided some delicate, narrow windows to pet him and be physically closer to him, and thus an avenue for socialization.

In my cat insurgency I learned certain lessons through painful experience. The most excruciating one is don't try to pick up a cat just because you can get close enough to do it because it is fast and has many sharp claws. The cuts on my hand will probably attest to this truth for awhile. Possibly even more lasting will be the smells and stains of cat pee, because Lil' Bit decided that our two sofas were the most appropriate places to relieve himself. I have already gone through one bottle of stain and odor remover and another is likely.

I won't compare my tribulations to the casualties and other trials suffered by U.S. forces in Iraq, but nevertheless, like the U.S. I found myself confronted by a variety of unexpected challenges and setbacks, but which had I thought more, and done more research I could have found out about these potential problems. Instead, I went ahead unprepared.

The U.S. has had to adapt in Iraq, altering its tactics and responses to try to gain better success. I also changed my methods for dealing with Lil' Bit, doing things like lifting the bed where he hid to flush him from the bedroom and then closing it to him so that he would have fewer places to hide and be forced to deal with me. Also, I started feeding him smaller amounts, more often, so that I would have more opportunity to deal closely with him.

Regardless, the venture still ended in defeat last night. One of the responses I instituted to deal with the cat peeing on the sofas was that I flipped them on their long end so that the cat couldn't get on them. I invited my neighbor to come over and visit Lil' Bit, which she did alone in the office, since he wouldn't come out if I was in there. While she did that I thought about the Iraq-Lil' Bit analogy while looking at my upended living room. I reached the conclusion that whether or not it was possible to housebreak Lil' Bit, it seemed that the cost was rising too high. Luckily for me my neighbor decided that Lil' Bit was very stressed out and that the arrangement was not working out, to which I of course agreed, and she took Lil' Bit back to her house.

I could make some facile comparison with Lil' Bit's departure and the Iraqi government asking the U.S. to leave by 2011, but I think instead that this is a point of divergence between the two. I could just throw the cat out, but the U.S. can't just leave, whether or when it does in fact leave, it has to deal with the mess it made, one way or another.