July 25, 2010
Since when did David Frum go to work for the Asian Football Confederation?
Greg Carlstrom noticed that the AFC managed to squeeze Iran, Iraq and North Korea into the same group in January's Asia Cup. (Plus the UAE, which is surely wondering what it did to deserve getting lumped in with the original Axis of Evil.) My prediction is the Pentagon will deploy Landon Donovan & Co. to Abu Dhabi to take care of these jokers once and for all ... but, true to form, it will only plan for the first ten minutes of each game, abandon the field for 70 minutes and then rush everyone back into the stadium with ten minutes left in order to secure a hard-fought draw and spare the United States and its allies blushes. Bob Bradley will play a 4-3-3 in the final ten minutes of the game, which Andrew Bacevich will say is unsustainable in the long term (and demand to know how long stoppage time will be) and which Gian Gentile will say is exactly the same as the 4-4-2 we were using in 2006 and, besides, probably won't work anyway. The U.S. public (too busy eating Cheeze-Its, whining about their taxes and playing FIFA Soccer 10 on their X-Boxes to pay much attention to the actual game being played in the Middle East) will wonder whether or not the soccer game was worth it in the first place, but that won't prevent Team USA from having to endure round after tedious round of Lee effing Greenwood on its return stateside.