Holy War
Three Years Of The Bush Crusade
As we observe the third anniversary of the Iraq war, what have we accomplished and what have we learned? Deposing Saddam was certainly a good idea, but he had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The truth is, the administration was bound and determined to invade Iraq. 9/11 merely presented a convenient opportunity. the administration exploiting America’s grief to launch the war for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Invading Iraq was what they’d come to Washington to do. The president said he consulted God about the Iraq invasion, which raises the question of which god Bush was talking to.
I have severe doubts
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would be comfortable with the
notion of President Bush ushering in the Apocalypse, but
religious fringe groups are already speculating about Daniel's
prophecy, noting that ancient Babylon is modern day Iraq and
claiming that the ram signifies fundamentalist Islam and Osama
bin Laden and his chief lieutenant Dr Ayman all-Zawahiri
represent the horns of the ram described in Daniel’s dream, one
horn being taller and younger than the other. Bush’s 2001 call
for a global organization against terrorism happen to spell the
acronym “GOAT.” This is, indeed, fringe thinking, but what if
this business somehow plays into the president’s motives? That
the United States must act as the arm of God and sword of
righteousness? Could this all be some Christian version of an
Islamic jihad or holy war?
Throughout history, a great many men have attempted to ascertain
the signs of the times and predict Christ's return or the
Apocalypse based on a spate of natural disasters, wars or other
global events. A great many preachers, today, are running around
saying God sent Katrina or that the war in Babylon (Iraq) is a
signal of Christ's soon returning. But the Bible warns us to be
careful of people who claim to know when Jesus is coming back or
when the end of this world is near. Many were convinced Jesus
would return in 1900 when an unnamed hurricane that hit
Galveston, Texas, killed an estimated 8,000 people, or on Aug.
6th, 1945, when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, killing over 150,000 people. Over time, there have
been many signs and many wonders, and many men and women who
claim to know what they all mean. No one, absolutely no one, say
with certainty that Katrina and Iraq mean Jesus is coming back.
I cannot say, with certainty, that these signs do not indicate
His soon coming. I can say, with certainty, that God didn't send
Katrina because God doesn't send disasters. Katrina was, most
likely, man's fault than God's, a product of global warming and
our general abuse of the planet's ecology. It is, however,
possible to suggest that God simply chose to not hold the storms
back, that the extreme global events are a manifestation of God
withdrawing just the smallest part of His grace from us, a grace
and safety we routinely take for granted as we idly go about our
daily lives.
The president, who at times politically convenient fancies
himself a born-again Christian, has said, with some reluctance,
that he consulted God about the Iraq invasion, falling just
short of claiming the God told him to do it. Which, of course,
raises the question of which god Bush was talking to. Jesus
Christ is biblically described as the Prince of Peace. War is
ontologically anti-Christian and it is unlikely that a
Judeo-Christian God would inspire us to kill anyone. In that
respect, I find the Christian right's near-blind support for
Bush and the war to be perplexing, the punch line of a joke I
don't get or perhaps the plot of a movie I've walked in on
halfway through. I find it terribly confusing when Christians,
pastors most especially, embrace and support things that are
clearly against the teachings of Christ. I am grieved to see
people committing hateful acts in Christ's name.
Hit 'Em First
Last week, the Administration has issued the “National Security
Strategy of the United States of America,” a new policy
statement which, essentially, reaffirms the old policy of
preemptive warfare. Despite the difficulties in Iraq, the
49-page report unapologetically reasserts the administration's
belief in the doctrine of pre-emption, attacking states or
terrorists groups that it believes are a threat to the United
States before they can attack us. It declares diplomacy to be
the first option in resolving crises, but goes on to say that
“we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even
if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's
attack.” The document also reiterates the administration's
commitment to spreading democracy around the world.
This a policy, described by Time.Com as “not binding and it's
largely theoretical,” not only goes against centuries of U.S.
foreign policy tradition but is an intensely destabilizing
policy of first aggression. Such a policy makes U.S. allies
nervous and U.S. enemies more willing to take preemptive action
against us as they have every reason to believe the U.S. will
hit them first.
The president’s “hit ‘em first” policy is perhaps the saddest
and most dangerous example of how little this president
understand global politics or world history. Through this
policy, the president has positioned the U.S., as the global
bully, ready and willing to topple governments we merely suspect
have evil plans against us. We have seen this policy in effect
in Iraq, whom we attacked because the administration suspected
they had evil plans against us and weapons of mass destruction
with which to do us harm. It turned out they had neither, and we
are now in the 1051st day since the president declared “mission
accomplished” on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Through
various cryptic warnings and an intensifying public relations
campaign carried out by Administration staff and cabinet
members, the president has clearly set his sights on Iran—an
infinitely greater challenge than Iraq. Having apparently
learned absolutely nothing from his Iraq quagmire, there is
little doubt the issuance and reiteration of
the president’s policy seems aimed squarely at Teheran.
From Time.Com:
The Washington Post reports that the debate on Iran policy
inside the Bush Administration is being won by the hawkish
element that favors a more aggressive approach aimed at ousting
the clerical regime. It recently allocated $75 million for
activities designed to promote democracy and undermine clerical
rule in Iran, and is reportedly gearing up the State Department
for a more activist role in relation to Iran. The problem facing
Washington this week, however, is that very few countries share
a regime-change agenda for Iran, and if they suspect that this
is the motive driving the nuclear confrontation, Washington may
find it much tougher to keep allies on board.
Time columnist Joe Klein:
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, military historian
Stephen Biddle argues that Iraq's internal strife is not a
"Maoist people's war” like Vietnam's was: it is a communal civil
war, and the Bush policy of rapidly building an Iraqi army
"throws gasoline on the fire ... Sunnis perceive the 'national'
army as a Shi'ite-Kurdish militia on steroids.” Pollack agrees:
"We have about 50 Iraqi battalions capable of fighting now, but
not one of them is blended ethnically.” Biddle argues that U.S.
Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad's efforts to broker a deal need to
be strengthened by U.S. threats “to manipulate the military
balance of power"—in other words, to support one of the ethnic
factions, as the British colonial empire used to do. It is true
that an Iraqi solution is impossible without a grand political
bargain (including a formula for distributing oil revenues), but
the idea that the U.S. can manipulate such an outcome—by force,
no less—seems fanciful at best.
...The third potential course is retreat, which Bush will never
countenance—but which is no longer unthinkable, given the
evaporation of public support for the war. Retreat would leave
anarchy in Iraq and quite possibly lead to a regional war of
Sunnis against Shi'ites. The President won't admit it, but on
the third anniversary of his war, the only plausible reason for
remaining in Iraq is to prevent an even greater catastrophe.
That is realism, American style.
So, here we are, three years of a war planned for only three
months, the worst fears and warnings of war opponents now fully
realized, the majority of the nation now firmly against the
continuing aggression and doubting the president’s judgment, his
own party now routinely rebelling against him, the president is
stubbornly sticking to his guns, convinced, somehow, that he
alone is right and millions upon millions of people are wrong.
The only light at the end of a very long tunnel seems to be that
public opinion has firmly turned against him, and his political
and strategic allies are abandoning ship. I can only pray that
the American people will somehow summon the courage and will to
stand against this terrible, terrible conflict and the sadly
tragic consequences of a truly misguided leader.
At a spirited news conference today, President Bush hinted that
U.S. forces could remain in Iraq after his presidency ends in
January 2009 — in answering a reporter's question about when all
American troops would leave. “That, of course, is an objective,”
Bush said, “And that will be decided by future presidents and
future governments of Iraq.”
In response to Bush's comments, Senate Minority Leader Harry
Reid, D-Nevada, said that deploying troops until 2009 is, “a
military commitment to Iraq that was never contemplated or
approved by the American people.”
The war is likely the saddest result of the unchecked growth of
political power by conservative factions and business interests.
The Republican party, whose soul is entirely owned by big
business, has turned hatred and fear into an impressive product
line of political demagoguery against which independent and
liberal interests cannot stand. Republican strength is such that
they even cowed Democrats into voting for the war, authorizing
President Bush to invade Iraq—something virtually no Democrat
(or, for that matter, likely no rational-thinking Republican)
actually believed was prudent, necessary or even productive in
any rational sense. By virtually owning the moral high ground,
the Republicans have, since the Clinton era, routinely shamed
the Democrats—as President Clinton himself shamed them. Just as
Republicans had been apologizing for Watergate while the
Democrats ran the tables on them, the Democrats have been
apologizing for President Clinton's infantile behavior with a
White House intern while the Republicans claim moral superiority
and run circles around them. For a decade, now, Democrats have
been struggling to prove they are not Bill Clinton. Many have
run toward the center, trying to look and sound like Republicans
and embarrassed by the word “liberal.” Anything the Republicans
want, all they need do is make it a moral issue. Since Clinton,
the Democrats have been petrified of being on the wrong side of
any moral issue. And that fear has, in fact, led us to war.
Republican Rope-A-Dope
The most brilliant and unexpected Republican strategy actually
involved the Democrats. It’s what I call Republican Rope-A-Dope,
after the famous Muhammad Ali strategy wherein the world
champion boxer would cover up and lean on the ropes, resting, in
fact, while his opponent wailed away on body blows Ali could
withstand. The assailant would actually tire himself out
punching away at Ali while Ali was, in fact, resting. Sensing
his opponent tiring, Ali would then explode in a flurry of blows
and win the contest.
The most ingenious thing the Republican party has learned how to
do is to shame the Democratic party into following the
Republican agenda. Having no apparent message and no apparent
spine of their own, the Democrats typically flail about trying
to find some message that will actually resonate with the
American people as effectively as the Republicans’ family values
strategy. The Democrats can’t run too hard at the Republicans
because the Republicans have the religious right in their
pocket—the American version of the Muslim Ayatollahs and Imams.
You can’t condemn family values without sounding like a
communist. Or, worse, an atheist.
Having no real voice of their own, unable or unwilling to choke
down their ethics and individual agendas the way the Republicans
can, the Democrats were and remain a deeply fractured party of
misfits. The GOP issues daily talking points, edicts from the
High Command which nearly all Republicans parrot in lock-step.
Which is, ironically, quite a communist thing to do: abandon
your own judgment and ethics for the good of the party. The good
of the party is, absolutely, the only thing that matters to the
Republicans, who behave, in the aggregate. Much more like
communists than like an American political party.
During the Clinton years, the Republicans fine-tuned their
political tactics, building an efficient and ferocious political
tank designed to mow down Democrats and liberal independents.
Challenges to the Republican Party doctrine are simply not
tolerated. Anyone who refuses to fall in line are deemed
un-American, and it is a stigma that sticks. In a warped
throwback to McCarthyism, the Republicans have set themselves up
as a moral authority, one so fierce no one—the Democrats least
of all—want to be on the wrong side of.
As a result, the Democrats learned they could shame and bully
the Democrats into going their way. In fact, the post-Clinton
trend became to run away from Clinton—and his historic domestic
and foreign policy successes, including the strongest economy in
nearly a century—while all but spitting on Clinton and keeping
the ultimately meaningless sexual misconduct squarely in the
public view. This was a Republican strategy, one the Democrats
felt they had no choice but to follow. To do anything else leant
the impression they endorsed the president’s behavior which
worked for the Republicans anyway.
So, Democrat after Democrat actually voted for the president’s
impeachment. It was a brilliant rope-a-dope, the Republicans
forcing the Democrats to eat their young. The Democrats hoped
voting for the impeachment would somehow distance themselves
form Clinton’s moral failure. What they didn’t seem to realize
was something the Republicans intrinsically understood: by
assassinating their own president, the Democrats were sealing
heir own fate with the American people. No one was happy about
Clinton’s incredibly bad judgment with women, but nobody likes a
turncoat weasel congressman clearly more interested in
re-election than in standing by Their Guy.
Abuse of Power
The impeachment of President Bill Clinton was an obvious abuse
of power by the Republican-dominated Congressional leadership.
Anyone with half a brain could see that the Republicans were, in
fact, using judicial process to accomplish a political goal,
attempting to do, in the House chamber, what they couldn’t
accomplish at the voting polls. The Democrats, boxed in by the
much smarter Republicans, saw only down side to fighting them.
So, one by one, Democrats stood up and condemned their own
president, much to the glee of the republicans who had
efficiently forced the Democrats to follow their agenda,
politically neutralizing the Democrat party while discrediting
one of the greatest presidents in American history, ensuring
that, come election time, no one would remember or care that we
were all much, much better off than we’d been eight years
before.
All of which was a setup for Vice President Al Gore, who, afraid
to embrace President Clinton too closely, bought the Republican
agenda and ran away from Clinton’s record. Which is how an
intelligent and articulate and gifted two-term Vice President, a
key member of an administration that had overseen one of the
longest economic expansions in peace time and created a $230
billion budget surplus, was unable to win his own state in the
2000 presidential election, and became deadlocked with a
dilettante Texas governor whose main asset was his daddy’s name
and his big oil buddies.
Unfortunately, by that time the Democrats had given up so much
power to the Republicans that the Republican monolith was fairly
unstoppable. The true extent of the power of this beast became
most evident during the contested 2000 election, where the
infinitely better organized and more efficient Republican team
baldly blocked every effort to a fair resolution to the
electoral crisis while running out the clock on the hapless and
beleaguered Gore, a guy who should have sailed into the White
House on Clinton’s coattails but instead chose to let the
Republicans define his campaign, responding to Republican fears
rather than run on Democratic hopes.
It’s fun to blame George W. Bush and the Republicans for
stealing the 2000 election, but, honestly, Vice President Gore
simply ran a bad campaign. He only got as far as he did by
default, by the excess momentum of the beloved president he
tried not to even mention during his campaign. Gore ran a
frankly stupid campaign, and he handed the White House to the
Republicans by allowing the Republicans to set the agenda and
tone of the presidential campaign. Then Gore tried using a
Republican trick—asking for recounts only in those Florida
districts that would help him, rather than asking for a
statewide recount—and handed the White House to George W. Bush.
Had Gore insisted on a statewide recount, the Republicans would
not have been able to stop him. By asking only for certain
districts, this allowed the Republicans to mount challenges on a
district-by-district basis and run out the clock. Of course, a
statewide recount risked the possibility of Gore losing, anyway,
but the pettiness of requesting recounts only in districts that
might help him stank of a Republican move, and not a very smart
one.
And that, at the end of the day, is the likely and obvious
problem, here: the Republicans are simply smarter than the
Democrats. They are, simply, better at what they do. Their unity
and brazen ruthlessness make the political entity a titan that
is difficult to run against. A titan which absolutely wanted
George W. Bush, an embarrassing, inarticulate political
lightweight just a click or two to the right of Dan Quayle.
Why?
Which beggars the question, why? Why would so powerful a
political party want a notorious non-thinker like Bush in the
Oval Office? A man with a record of alcoholism and DUI arrest
and rumored drug abuse? A man whose businesses failed and whose
entire life was about partying and, well, being his father’s
son? A Texas governor who won that office mainly on the strength
of his father’s name and whose prime reason for wanting to be
governor was to make this run for the White House?
The answer may be Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, architects of
the first Gulf War. Political heavyweights who wield power in
near silence and invisibility, these men are the Anti-Dubya,
matching enormous strength for every perceived weakness of the
president. Cheney’s quiet articulate intellectualism and deep
roots to big business interests—most of whom have profited
enormously in the six years he’s been Vice President—speaks
directly to his role within the Administration. The rumor became
a joke that Bush was merely the front man while Cheney and
Rumsfeld actually ran the government.
It was a joke that became less funny when the president,
inexplicably and for reasons many Americans could never
efficiently parse, became sidetracked from his otherwise
skillful prosecution of all Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan
and began preparing for an invasion of Iraq. It just made no
sense. Our goal was to find Osama bin Laden and shut down his
network. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein despised bin Laden, who had
himself sought Saddam’s overthrow and derided Saddam as a pagan
and mongrel. These men loathed one another, and there was no
evidence that Iraq had anything at all to do with the e9/11
attacks.
The president’s campaign was mostly a sales campaign, selling
the Iraq war to the American people. It was a tough sell,
winning over only the die-hard Republican and moral-right
faithful, as the president rejected every diplomatic effort and
every call for reason and patience. The Iraq thing seemed like a
bizarre distraction which ballooned into a bizarre obsession:
Get Saddam. Which must have puzzled Saddam, considering Saddam
had done nothing to merit all of this attention.
Bush’s reasons for war with Iraq were so flimsy, virtually no
American ally stood with him. France became publicly reviled for
its outright rejection of the Bush doctrine, but most every
other major American ally either declined to become involved or
sent only token assistance. Bush’s “Coalition of The Willing”
was a mere shadow of what his father had accomplished. It was,
in fact, an insult to his father’s legacy to suggest Bush II’s
“coalition” was anything more than a propaganda device and an
exploitation of his father’s brilliant political strategy.
Bush would not be deterred from Iraq under any circumstances,
which made many if not most people suspect the man was crazy.
The war was in Afghanistan. bin Laden was in Afghanistan.
Moderate and even some conservative Muslim states were hotly
against bin Laden, whose attack on civilians and Muslims were
regarded as contrary to Islamic teaching. Our allies were with
us. There was no place bin Laden could go no the planet where
somebody wasn’t looking for him.
President Bush squandered all of that good will, shattering his
tenuous alliances with moderate Muslim states, in his
months-long ramp up to Iraq. One by one, our allies moved away
from us. One by one, Bush alienated and angered moderate and
conservative Muslim states in the region. It was a
diplomatically disastrous choice, to reject every reasonable and
rational thought in a relentless move towards the inevitable: an
invasion of Iraq. An unprovoked invasion based on a bizarre and
destabilizing doctrine of preemptive warfare. The entire planet
literally scratched its collective head, wondering what drugs
Dubya was on to distract from a goal the entire globe
supported—finding and punishing bin Laden—to this rush to
Baghdad.
Pax Americana
It is likely the turn toward Iraq was a move predestined by the
Republican hard right before Bush was ever sworn in. Bush was,
in fact, sworn in for the specific purpose of invading Iraq.
Iraq was seen as a weak state with no real ties to Arab nations
in the region. The U.S. army had effortlessly defeated the Iraqi
army in less than two weeks, and our weapons and tactics were
now a decade more advanced. Military and political strategists
may have decided toppling Saddam would be the U.S.’s best hope
of creating long-term stability in the region, and Mideast
stability was the U.S.’s best chances for long-term security
from bin Laden and those who will surely follow in his
footsteps. Thus, the Iraq thing wasn’t completely without
rational thought, but what rational thought there was was
incredibly Pollyannaish: it was best-case-scenario thought,
thinking which foolishly believed all Iraqis were, in fact
Iraqis—the same kind of racist thinking many whites have when
they consider black America as a collection of people who all
talk and think the same way. It was disastrously stupid thinking
by people who hold Ph.D.’s.
The tragedy of 9/11 provided the opportunity the president
needed to invade Iraq. It wasn’t a perfect fit—the
administration knew the president’s sales campaign would seem
overly hawkish if not irrational—but the national hurt demanded
action, and bombs dropping on Baghdad would surely fill the
bill. The Republicans also counted on the proven gullibility of
the American people, and their trust in the Republicans as
keepers of truth and core American values. Not just
gullible—vulnerable. A wounded nation, reeling from the 9/11
attacks and suffering great pain, would accept Bush’s vague and
watery accusations and his inexplicable refusal to consider any
reasonable alternatives to war.
It was major political capital in the bank, and the Republicans
spent heavily promoting a war absolutely no one in America fully
understood the motives for or believed in. But, like good church
folk, we just nodded and agreed with whatever nonsense came over
the pulpit, and soon everybody was waving flags and signing up
and buying into the rightness of this war—even while most
rational thinkers remained puzzled as to why Bush wanted this so
badly or what this war could possibly achieve.
From early on, this was clearly a done deal: the president was
taking us to war, for reasons largely his own. The stated
reasons—that Iraq was preparing to attack us with weapons of
mass destruction—seemed doubtable then and have since been
proven completely untrue. What is true, however, is this
administration arrived in Washington, eight months before the
terrorist attacks, bound and determined to invade Iraq. They
were absolutely going to do this. 9/11 merely presented a
convenient opportunity. The president and administration
exploited America’s grief to launch their war initiative for
reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
Invading Iraq was what they’d come to Washington to do. In this
context, the outcome of the 2000 election was never really in
doubt. Powerful forces had already decided that Bush would win.
That Bush must win. Because the reshaping (and profiteering) of
the Middle East was, in their view, our only hope to prevent
dire political and economic problems both domestically and
abroad. There was simply too much at stake. Under no
circumstances would Al Gore be allowed to take office.
The goals were likely a re-writing of political lines in the
Mideast. A Pax Americana, western values imposed on developing
states that would lead to an epic and unprecedented new world
where the Mideast is more like India and free trade rockets the
world economy and everybody’s driving a Lexus. Great and lasting
peace and economic growth can indeed be achieved, these men
surely thought, but only if the region that gave birth to bin
Laden and Khomeini and Kaddafi (remember him?) could be
restructured and the people liberated. Once these people tasted
freedom, these men likely believed, they’d never again want to
suffer under tyranny.
It is likely they imagined a months-long if not weeks-long war
followed by a brief occupation that would, in turn, lead to such
an outpouring of goodwill among the grateful Iraqi people that
the U.S. would be invited to stay, building military bases and
forging economic alliances profitable to both parties. Iraq
would become, virtually overnight, the new Saudi Arabia,
economically powerful and politically stable and a friend to the
United States. And that relationship would, I turn, reshape the
Arab world as citizens of oppressive regimes would see the
happy, free Iraqis waving American flags and want the same for
themselves. Rehabilitating America’s reputation in the region
would lead to the ultimate win—a Palestinian state—which would
guarantee the security of Israel and reduce if not eliminate
terrorism as a political tool.
I’m reasonably sure these men must have surely anticipated some
down side to this lofty goal, and they were surely warned about
the downside by brilliant minds within their own secretive inner
circles. But these men, many of them with their mortality
showing (Cheney’s heart problems and Rumsfeld's age), surely
knew that the presidency of George W. Bush would be their last
at-bat for this sort of thing. And George W. Bush, the
anti-intellectual Slacker President, would be their best
pitchman for this bizarre and illogical derailment of an
otherwise efficient campaign to nab bin Laden. Bush’s
inarticulate, Just Folks nature would work for them, as
illogical concepts are the norm for him. I have no doubt that
many of the faithful came away from his rallies wondering what
the heck he was talking about, but confident enough in Bush’s
Tru Value Hardware Store honesty and farm-bred jocularity to
trust his judgment: getting Saddam was the best use of our
resources and worth the loss of American lives. Saddam was
behind 9/11.
People actually believed this.
What They Knew, When They Knew It
August 6, 2001, a month before the 9/11 attacks, the president
was given a briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in
US.” I and other have speculated that the president likely
doesn’t read these reports. Too much paperwork. Too many words.
Perhaps delegating this to aids and/or preferring oral
briefings, the president, I thought, may not have paid any
attention to this warning.
But, what if he did? What if the president’s inner circle were
well aware of the impending attacks—and simply allowed them to
happen? There’s been speculation, over the years, that U.S.
intelligence forces allowed the attacks at Pearl Harbor to
happen because there seemed no other way to rally public opinion
and support for the U.S.’s entrance into world War II. What if
our present administration, understanding the long-term
consequences of continued unrest in the Middle East and arriving
in Washington with the Iraq invasion squarely in their sights,
saw the possibility of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil as the
perfect Pearl Harbor event to rally public support to their
actual agenda—an invasion of Iraq?
I’m not saying that’s what happened. I pray that’s not what
happened. But, let’s speculate for a moment: what if the
security briefing wasn’t ignored? What if it was read, and the
administration chose to do nothing about it? It’s possible
they’d have no idea the scale of the attack or the terrible toll
of lives lost—it’s possible that was well beyond their
expectations and fears. But it is quite possible the
administration simply allowed domestic terrorist plots to
advance in the mistaken belief in a greater good, 9/11 becoming
the rallying point for an aggressive Mideast policy which would,
in turn, give birth to the new world order; western-style
democracy bringing freedom and peace and stability to a region
that has threatened world peace for decades.
Both Vice President Dick Cheney (who served as U.S. defense
Secretary during the first Gulf War) and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld (President Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense)
embrace some form of this concept of a reformed, westernized
Middle East. Both men see a stable Middle East as the only
likely path toward long-term global peace and economic growth.
Cheney certainly believes corporate investment is the way to a
strong economy and a strong economy will certainly cure all
American ills. In this perspective, Cheney's naked corporate
ambition, making hundreds of billions of dollars for his friends
at Halliburton and others, has an almost altruistic bent to it:
the Vice President truly believing his secretive and thus
seemingly sinister agenda is ultimately in the best interest of
the American people.
Lessons
As we observe the third anniversary of the Iraq war, what have
we accomplished and what have we learned? Deposing Saddam was
certainly a good idea, if for no other reason than they guy was
a dangerous lunatic who, given the opportunity, surely would
have attacked us. Free elections were held, on schedule, and the
first Iraqi parliament was seated (though they have yet to
legislate much of anything).
That’s just about all the good news there is.
With instability in the Mideast and Africa keeping oil prices
over $60 per barrel, the U.S. is experiencing uniform gasoline
price spikes across the country. This is particularly shameful
considering the Mideast instability is caused, in no small part,
by the United States itself, and U.S. oil companies have been
experiencing unprecedented record profits as a result of high
oil prices. With spring and summer approaching, the same U.S.
government has mandated environmental controls which require a
switch to an Ethanol gasoline blend. However, with oil
refineries still largely out of action because of Hurricane
Katrina damage, there won’t be enough ethanol to go around.
Rather than take emergency steps to suspend the Ethanol
requirement, the government appears to be doing nothing at all
as the price at the pump is projected to hit $3.50 and higher
for unleaded regular, with a corresponding exponential ripple
effect degrading every area of the U.S. economy.
The Chicago Sun-Times:
Congress pushed the ceiling on the national debt to nearly $9
trillion Thursday, and the House and Senate promptly voted for
major spending initiatives for the war in Iraq, hurricane relief
and education. The House approved $92 billion in new money for
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for relief along the
hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. The Senate adopted a $2.8 trillion
budget blueprint that anticipates deficits greater than $350
billion for both this year and next. Senators earlier voted
52-48 to send Bush a measure that would allow the government to
borrow an additional $781 billion and prevent a first-ever
default on Treasury notes.
Three years later, Iraq’s infrastructure remains badly damaged
with basic services like water and electricity only sporadically
functioning. Terrorists, both homegrown and flooding in from
surrounding radical Arab nations, continue to attack and destroy
building projects as fast as the Americans can begin them,
bombing oil refineries, power plants, schools and other
municipal projects. Terrorist insurgent attacks have shifted
from attacking American and “coalition: forces to sectarian
attacks pitting Muslim against Muslim. For reasons that are not
quite clear to me, the Iraqi people can’t seem to see through
the transparently evil efforts of radical insurgents to
destabilize the Iraqi government and foment civil war. The
attacks on mosques and Muslim sects seem obvious propaganda, yet
the Iraqi people seem to be falling for it, inciting bloody
reprisals which incite bloody reprisals in turn.
Poor and at-risk youth, of all ethnicities, make up a
disproportionate number of servicemen and reservists. Many of
these young people could not afford college any other way or
could not find well-paying jobs. Dodging improvised explosive
devices and suicide bombers is the price of putting food on
their table. Additionally, the Pentagon has an ongoing “back
door draft,” wherein military reservists find themselves on
extended deployments of a year or longer in the war zone. This
takes these men and women away from their jobs and imposes
financial hardships on their families, many of which end up
filing for food stamps and other relief.
U.S. commanding officers on the ground put their very best face
on these developments, but the bottom line is no one can
predict, with any accuracy, the course of these events. No one
can say, specifically, how long U.S. forces will have to remain
on the ground, and the Pax Americana worldview—permanent U.S.
bases on Iraq and free trade with a diplomatic Iran and
Syria—now seem, more than ever, misguided and childish ambitions
from men deeply out of touch with reality.
America is loathed even more throughout the Arab world, and the
war has created tens of thousands of bin Ladens—orphaned boys
who will grow to become embittered men who will live only to
hate America.
We have spent more than $249 billion on the war in Iraq, with
experts predicting the final cost of the war could reach $1
trillion.
1054 days ago, on May 5th, 2003, President Bush stood on the
deck of an aircraft carrier and declared the Iraq campaign,
“Mission Accomplished.” Major operations in Iraq had been
completed, the United States stood victorious.
1054 days later, we’ve 2180 American lives, with 17004 war
wounded, having lost limbs and eyes and suffering the terrible
consequences of this war. 33,679 estimated Iraqi casualties
And no end in sight.
Christopher J. Priest
20 March 2006
editor@praisenet.org
TOP OF PAGE
