Hail to Dubya! The Wicked Witch is Dead!
So, are you enjoying the Iraq occupation as much as I am? I don't know about you, but I sleep better at night knowing that foreign policy whiz kid George W. Bush has decided to focus his keen intellect (and our troops, treasure and credibility) on solvin' that there Iraq problem. It's a piece of cake. Ya just gotta kill the right people, that's all.
Okay, Bush is not a total imbecile on international issues. I'm pretty sure that if handed a globe, he could pick out the United States, Texas, and being an expert on axes, the north and south poles. Beyond that, I wouldn't bet the farm that Bush could name too many other geographic features. Far from being a problem, I'm sure that the Bush people consider this an asset. I mean, why waste valuable time trying to understand the complex workings of the world when we can simply remake it in our image instead? After all, if given a chance, everybody really wants to be an American. All the Iraqi people need is to taste that first Big Mac and the kafias will fly off , crosses will appear above the mosques, and Joe Francis can get to work on his Iraqi Girls Gone Wild! video, right?
So when Bush's band of chicken hawks started discussing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein just hours after the September 11 attacks, Bush understood the people of Iraq to be very much like the soldiers of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. If somebody would just throw a bucket of water on the bastard in charge , Bush and Company thought, the people of Iraq would throw down their weapons and rejoice. Hail to Dubya! The Wicked Witch is dead! Afterward, all the U.S. forces would have to do is have a parade in Baghdad, receive the key to the city, click their heels together three times, and be back in Kansas in time for supper.
It turns out that reality is a little different. It seems that some people just don't appreciate it when you kill their fellow countrymen, even if it's for their own good. Consequently, American soldiers stuck in Iraq are dying on an alarmingly regular basis. Could this have been anticipated before the invasion? Of course. In order to do so, however, one must put one's self in the place of one's enemy, which is an ability that egocentric conservatives lack. For instance, imagine that the United States was a debt-ridden country with high unemployment and an un-elected, repressive leader who made everybody's lives miserable. (Oops! Too close to reality.) Let's make it much worse. Let's say that America is run by a dim, detached cowboy who threatens the stability of the rest of the world. (Damn! This is harder than I thought!) Okay, let's go over the top with our example. Imagine that our leader tortured and killed his own subjects and stayed in power through the systematic murder of his suspected enemies. Next, imagine the existence of another country with a military so superior to ours that if it chose to invade America, we would have no chance of stopping it. Further imagine that this fictitious nation, in conjunction with its former ally, our scumbag leader, was largely responsible for ten years of sanctions against America, which destroyed our economy and killed at least a half a million of our children. Just for fun, throw in the fact that Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell agree that this nation is made up of Devil worshippers, and that this nation's very existence really pisses God off.
Suddenly this super-superpower decides that regime change in America is necessary. So, this imagi-nation attacks America, killing a large percentage of our military personnel and at least enough civilians to equal one or two World Trade Center disasters (an historically low civilian casualty figure for such an invasion, I might add). Do you think we Americans would welcome this invasion? Do you think that the loved ones of the tens of thousands of dead soldiers and thousands of civilians would rejoice? It would be much more likely that Americans would react the way the Iraqis are reacting. We'd be mad as hell. We'd take our firearms (Thank God for the NRA! In the context of this fantasy scenario, anyway.) and take pot shots at the occupying forces in our streets and do anything else we could think of to hasten the departure of the evil invaders. Those who died in the attempt to oust the occupiers would be held up as patriots. Regardless of what we thought of our disgusting leader, nobody would rest in America until the invading nation was limping home with its tail tucked between its legs.
Now that you've seen Operation Iraqi Freedom through the eyes of the Iraqis, can you possibly be surprised at what is taking place in Iraq?
Next, we have the issue of weapons of mass destruction, hereafter referred to as WMD. In the myopic mind's eye of the Bush administration, the Iraqis had huge stockpiles of the world's nastiest bits, and were preparing to hand them over to their imagined friends in al Qaida. When the U.S. invasion began, according to the Bush administration, everybody employed in developing, producing, and guarding these terrible weapons suddenly changed their minds about handing the WMD over to bad guys and just walked away from their posts, leaving these massive stockpiles of goodies nestled snug in their beds. According to these people, these stockpiles are sitting there right now, unguarded and undisturbed, waiting for the Americans to stumble onto them and secure them.
Okay, back to our imagined scenario. If you worked on these weapons, is that what you would do when the invaders established their beachhead at South Padre Island? Get real. We would seek out somebody, anybody, who would be willing and able to use these weapons against the invaders. And you can bet that the vast majority of our stockpiles could be out of the country and headed to where they could do some good in a time span much shorter than the two months we've given the Iraqis to accomplish the same thing.
But, hey, I'm just a guy who writes political commentary. Washington is supposed to have guys who get paid to imagine this sort of thing, isn't it? How is it that I imagined our predicament and none of those professional policy analysts could?
The truth is that our analysts did imagine these scenarios, and passed on their findings to their superiors. Enter the following useful, if tired, expression:
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
This is doubly true in the Bush administration, since the ends of the horses that do the drinking are nowhere to be found.
As you can see, the very best scenario regarding the existence of WMD is that Bush and Company lied through their teeth, and that there never were any WMD in post-1991 Iraq. If there is any truth at all to Bush's claims of their existence, we will never be sure that WMD are all accounted for. The only certainty is this: Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was in control of these alleged weapons and showed no intention of using them against America during the 12 years after Gulf War I. After the invasion, nobody knows who is in charge of these alleged weapons. Does anybody, excluding the nuts on the political right who got us into this mess, really think we are safer now?
Thus, our future is defined: Americans are destined to 1) watch helplessly as our soldiers die one by one in Iraq, and 2) wait for the other shoe to drop. And wonder which city that shoe will drop on this time.
I've said it before and, unfortunately, I'll have to say it again: There is a very real and very high price to pay for allowing people as stupid as those in the current administration to lead our nation.
7/06/03
