October 27, 2004 News & Views » News Feature

Pin It
Submit to Reddit
Favorite

The Homecoming 

A pre-election essay

By
click to enlarge PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/ COFFINS PHOTO: US AIR FORCE
  • Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images/ COFFINS Photo: US Air Force

Page 2 of 4

"They keep telling us that Iraqi security forces are the exit strategy," said an Army staff officer, "but there's a feeling on the ground that Iraqi security forces are in cahoots with the insurgents and the general public to get the occupiers out."

It's funny, the way you can't trust anyone in an occupied country. Does it sound familiar? The Iraq war is different from Vietnam only in the sense that Vietnam was so much easier to justify and explain. Compared with the wild and cynical assault on the fortress of Saddam Hussein, Vietnam began as a tidy, promising little war. The US acted in accordance with a bipartisan consensus and an established foreign policy, a tradition of Communist containment. A sovereign nation had asked us for protection. There was a context, a rationale, ample precedent.

We see none of the above in Iraq, now that the sandstorm of outright falsehood has settled. No trace of nuclear weapons, biological weapons or Osama bin Laden has yet been discovered in Iraq, and today our warmakers wish us to believe that we did this all for the Iraqis and their precious freedom -- though this freedom is unknown to them and 95 percent of them want us to go home. The war has been a priceless recruiting tool for Islamic terrorists and the "War on Terror" is becoming a toothless sham because of the resources we're wasting in Iraq. For the same reason, critics claim, Homeland Security has been shamefully understaffed and underfunded -- by the same White House that manipulates our fear of another 9-11.

What really happened here? What is it possible to believe? Bush partisans recoil when someone mentions petroleum. But historian Dan T. Carter, with a little research, caught Paul Wolfowitz actually saying out loud, in April 2003: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." Try spinning that. And the crowning irony is that oil prices have soared since the march to Baghdad, to over $50 a barrel.But far more frightening than the oil scenario -- the West Texas rationale -- is the story Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas tells about a private conversation with George Bush (also recounted by Dan T. Carter in "Confronting the War Machine" from Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent).

"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda," Abbas claims Bush told him, "and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."

I don't pretend to be the one who can tell you whether George W. Bush is a dim tool of sinister forces, as I always suspected, or a genuine gear-loose megalomaniac with god-worms crawling through his tortured brain. It's not for me to know or say. But the only steam-brake left on the runaway locomotive of George's private jihad is the election that looms before us.

I disagree with Bush on virtually every issue; most of his supporters support him for reasons I find incomprehensible or abhorrent. In four short years his administration has poisoned or criminally neglected our economy, our environment, our international reputation and our tradition of human rights and civil liberties. Even science has come under fierce attack, by a rightwing coalition of corporate thugs and fundamentalist ignoramuses. The indigent, the powerless and the disadvantaged have never faced dimmer prospects; in one of the most chilling scenes in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, military recruiters go trolling for poor boys in the malls. Of 45 million who lack health insurance, 1.7 million are veterans.

Yet none of those crises and none of the issues they raise seem worth debating on the eve of this historic election. The Iraq war ought to be enough, and far more than enough. "The war that never made sense," columnist Bob Herbert called it -- not a War on Terror but a War on Reason. If ever there was a deal-breaker, a faith-breaker between a president and the people who elected him (or, in this case, allowed him to take office when his election was in question), it's this bloody-minded travesty of a war that Bush concocted out of far-right obsessions and cooked intelligence, lied flagrantly to legitimize, and then pursued to such a tragic, pitiful cul-de-sac. Such poor judgment yoked to such abysmal incompetence is unprecedented in all presidential history known to me.

Full text

1 2 3 4

More News Feature »

Tags: ,

Speaking of News_feature.html

Pin It
Submit to Reddit
Favorite

Latest in News Feature

More by Hal Crowther

Calendar

More »

Search Events

all events
concerts
restaurants
movie times

Most Popular
Most Shared
Most Commented

© 2019 Womack Digital, LLC
Powered by Foundation