Here is a long post I posted on a personal blog before the 04 election. It struck me how powerful the realities both then and now are in juxtaposition...excuse the length...
[then]Recently, someone sent me [a] link [that is now dead]:
This [took] you to a website that talk[ed] about the sacrifices of our forefathers and service professionals for the sake of our freedom and chastises us for complacency while showing some, at times, graphic pictures of the 9/11 tragedy. The actual presentation is quite powerful and moving, however if you click on the info link and read the blurb, you find the political slant of the author of the site. He makes the mistake, like so many others these days, of making a judgment against anyone who has spoken out against the Iraq war as being on the wrong side in the "war on terror".
This is a critically important discussion and is a particularly relevant issue as we head into the November elections, arguably the most important election this country has seen since Kennedy vs. Nixon, and quite possibly even more important than that. We can no longer allow people to paint us as black and white or red and blue, however you want to look at it. You CAN support the war on terror and not support the Iraq war. You CAN have supported the war on Iraq initially and then change your mind when the facts came to light without being charged with being wishy-washy.
It usually just makes me shake my head in resignation or listless disgust when people characterize their political or religious beliefs in such a way as to say that anyone who doesn't believe everything they do, exactly as they do, are the scum of the earth. However, it is going far enough now that it is starting to piss me off. Especially since the people, who should be speaking out against this kind of churlish prejudicial grouping, are ignoring this issue and talking about all kinds of other issues which, while important, are not even on the same level as this problem.
In the info blurb on the aforementioned site, it characterizes people who are against the war in Iraq as the cowards who let things like 9/11 just happen and tuck their tails and run. Well here's a big "Fuck You very much" to that because I never supported the war in Iraq but you can be damn sure if I had my choice, I would be in some desert cammies and be combing through the hills and caves of Pakistan/Afghanistan looking for the people who truly had anything to do with 9/11. I don't believe in bringing them to justice. I don't believe in killing them in some sort of eye for an eye kind of ritualistic revenge bullshit scenario. I believe that common sense tells you that there is a rabid dog out there that can bite at any time and has proven its ability to hurt by taking a giant chunk out of our proverbial ass (no offense intended to my New York readers). I believe common sense says that while that dog is still out there you put every resource you have into locating and eliminating that threat; no trials, no questions asked, just elimination of a threat.
Another way to compare these two events, since everyone is so keen to do so, is to look at the same scenario but on a smaller scale. Let's look at a small town in New Jersey where a old mafia guy has lived his whole life. Everyone knows this guy has been involved in some shady stuff in his past and that, even though he is in his eighties, he still has the ability to have someone beat to a pulp if they cross him the wrong way. He was probably even involved in a murder or ten back in the day but these were always simply other mobsters who had gotten in the way of his business dealings.
Then, one day, some other young white guy gets a bunch of his racist friends together and gets them all really riled up about how "the blacks and arabs is trying to take everthin' away" from them. A couple of these guys get together and go on a killing spree and kill 28 people in one day by burning down a church, predominantly attended by African-Americans, during the middle of a service on Sunday. The next day another group of these dirtbags drives through a rundown low-income area, predominantly inhabited by immigrants and African-Americans and just start indiscriminately firing their automatic weapons at anything that moves and several things that don't. They pick off another 19, to include 7 children under the age of 10, by the time the day is done.
There is a huge backlash in the media, and the entire community, as well as all the surrounding communities, are mobilized in their outrage. There are town meetings and loud protestations of fighting these people with every resource and chasing them to the ends of the earth if need be. So the police put together a huge task force that includes local, county, state, and federal officers all hell bent and driven to rid this community of the scourge of these "evildoers". With all these resources, a large group of the racists and their friends and cohorts, who just happened to be with the wrong people at the wrong time, get rounded up and are either killed in shootouts or are brought to jail. However, the rest of the racists just blend themselves back into society because it is hard to distinguish a racist white guy from a normal white guy if the racist simply keeps his mouth shut at the right time and doesn't look like a skinhead. Even the charismatic leader who stirred up all this hate couldn't be found after 6 months of intensive searching because he was hanging out in the country area between the small town in question and the really racist town close by where most of the people supported him. The cops from that town were even part of the task force but no one really had much trust in them to "do the right thing" and bring this guy down if the opportunity really came up.
So, with the manhunt failing to quickly nab the mastermind, the mayor of the small town decides to go after the mafia boss with the task force to try to send a message to all the wrongdoers out there, despite the fact that the mob boss was too weak in both body and "power", not to mention motivation, to really present much threat to the average citizen of the town. In the midst of that whole process, the dangerous racist is given plenty of time to regroup and refocus his efforts while the task force blunders through the mafia boss's neighborhood, tearing it up so much in their battle against him that the innocent people who live near him have worse lives after the fact than they did before he was taken.
With all their high-tech gadgetry, the task force does a pretty swift job of overwhelming the mob boss and his "family" but they still lose a few policemen along the way as will happen in any battle. Many other policemen are completely disillusioned about their jobs as they are held over on the task force with agendas that they no longer believe in and impossible or unclear goals with no end in sight.
This scenario is so similar to the bigger reality of our world today yet it seems like the plot of some really bad B movie.
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant who committed atrocious acts upon his people and anyone who fell under his control. In essence, if you look deeply through all the biographies of the "evil" man, you can see that he was really just a bully, desperately clinging to any semblance of power he could and crushing anyone who might threaten him. He was not a mastermind, in fact if you look through much of what has been written about him or said by him over the last thirty years, you would realize that he was often characterized as sharp but not as intelligent. He was shrewd and knew just enough about the way to use and abuse people to be dangerous but he also said he was going to win the Persian Gulf War against a true coalition who, eventually and inevitably, wiped him out in a matter of days.
Now anyone who says he was not a threat to us at all is going overboard because of course he presented a threat to us, if for nothing else then because he could easily have decided he wanted to take over Kuwait again and we would have been compelled to go to war to stop him once again. However, any intelligent person knows that the "direct, compelling threat" he supposedly presented to us before the time of the most recent war was not credible and was embellished so far as to make it laughable when compared to the cold hard facts.
Back to the point...good men and women died in this war damnit and people have lost sight of that! They died because they wanted to believe what their leaders were telling them. They died doing their job, feeling that they were doing their part to further the cause for freedom. They died knowing full well in the backs of their minds that at the very least, this war was questionable and rushed in a way that made any sort of sacrifice a potentially worthless loss of their life not dissimilar to the questionable loss of lives in Vietnam. We look back at that time with shame and curse our leaders of the time for allowing thousands of our young men and women (many who were forced to serve through the draft) to die for a cause that while somewhat valid, was being executed in so questionable of a way as to taint that entire event forevermore. But my point here is that when people do agree to put their blood up as a sacrifice to the tree of liberty, it had better be shed for a clear and present danger to that freedom; otherwise, the people who allowed them to die for unclear and disingenuous reasons ought to be strung up for crimes against their own people.
I know that sort of thing would never happen and you may think I'm going overboard but think about this very seriously; as a parent, if you sent your twelve year old out into the street to grab your four year old after you have fallen and broken a leg, no one would think you had done something wrong. But if you sent your twelve year old out into traffic to pick up your dog and the child was killed by a car, you would rightfully be treated like a criminally irresponsible parent. Now imagine if your responsibility was not one life but hundreds of thousands and you sent all of them into harm's way for the wrong or at least unclear reasons.
There is no question that this dereliction of responsibility to the duty as commander in chief is so reprehensible that not only do I think he should be removed from office in November, but I also think he should be brought up on criminal charges for reckless endangerment and over 250 cases of involuntary manslaughter. It is our duty to question our leaders and I am truly ashamed of my generation's complete lack of responsibility in challenging this man.
Think about this from the point of view of another country like say New Zealand for instance. We say Saddam is a threat to freedom because he "might" have nuclear, chemical or biological weapons (although he had none) and goes against the authority of all established international bodies by doing whatever he wanted and tries to force his governmental ideas on his neighbors.
Now let's look at Bush, not as Americans who might have some sort of misplaced loyalty to a fellow countryman, but as New Zealanders who probably don't have a whole lot of bias either way. If "possibly" having all those weapons is a big deal then it is really scary that Bush actually DOES have all those weapons at his fingertips and everyone knows it for a fact since we are the only country to ever use them. He has thumbed his nose at every international body that has challenged or questioned his reasoning, even when all they wanted at the very least was for him to wait for another few months to ensure that what he was saying was totally right. There is only one reason for rushing the war as he did: because he knew his evidence was so flimsy. So he used his power and influence to force others (read Blair, Powell, Rice, Tenet, et al) to stand up and spin the flimsy evidence right up into a big enough shitstorm that people started actually wondering if it might be true and leaning on the patriotic and vengeful spirit whipped up in the American people by 9/11, pushed us quickly into a war where real people died, real homes were crushed, real families were wiped out, before anyone could really figure out that there was actually a bitter, horrible little man behind a curtain pulling all the strings. Finally, instead of truly liberating the people as he is so wont to say, he has forced his ideas of democracy on them rather than find out what the people wanted because it is quite likely that the majority of the people would want shari'a or Islamic Law rather than a secular democratic government. So he is also forcing his ideas of governance onto the people of another country.
Its funny that when you compare them and look at it from an outsider's point of view, Bush is much scarier, especially when you consider that on top of all that, he has the world's most sophisticated and powerful military at his fingertips and has now demonstrated an itchy trigger finger.
The truly sad part of all this is that if Bush had only allowed the inspectors to spend another 3-6 months there as the United Nations, as well as our allies in NATO, requested, then at the very least the international community would have had to grudgingly come to the table and support the decision to remove Saddam. This would have changed so many things. First, we would have had an international mandate to start the war, thus legitimizing the cause and making everyone much more proud of the job they were doing and feeling justified in the taking of lives for "the greater good". Secondly, we would not look like the occupying asshole bullies we do now because so many other countries would have rubberstamped the process that no one could justifiably point the finger at us. That point would concurrently limit our exposure as the big bad enemies of Islam that we are doing a good job of acting like and although the backlash hasn't happened yet, I am sure we will see fallout from this at some point in the future that could have been avoided. Furthermore, the responsibility for rebuilding and restructuring a new government in Iraq would have been an international task meaning everyone would be paying for it rather than just us and it would also legitimize the actual government that came out the other end of the process. As it stands now, no matter how honest we could ever possibly try to be, a large majority of both Iraqi nationals as well as others from foreign countries will believe that we have controlled the process to our benefit and thus makes the government a "puppet" of the American government.
Honestly, I don't really like Kerry all that much. He is the proto typical so-so kind of politician that has made the American public apathetic to politics over the last 20 years but I would take just about anybody over Bush right now. Someone once said it was wrong to vote against a bad person rather than for the right person but in this case, Kerry may not be the best man for the job but Bush is for sure the worst.
I have already decided that if Bush is elected (for the first time) as President in November that I am moving out of this country for at least the forseeable future, as soon as I can. I am making a prediction that if this tragedy does happen then we will at the very least have another war in the next few years with either Iran, Syria, or North Korea. I know that none of those come as a surprise, especially after the propaganda bullshit Bush and his cronies have been putting out about these countries, but what is really key to note here is that despite these countries being a slight but credible threat to us over the last 40 years, no administration has ever pushed them more into a corner than Bush's. And we all know what happens when you corner a dangerous animal, when it realizes it has nothing to lose anymore by attacking. These are not pushover countries like Iraq or Afghanistan were and if we keep pushing them, eventually they are going to lash out and lash out hard. The only reason Bush backed off North Korea is because they probably really DO actually have nuclear weapons and despite our best guesses that they couldn't hit American soil with their rockets, all it would take is for one to hit anywhere near Los Angeles and 30 to 50 million Americans will be dead or dying within the following couple years and the only thing keeping them from doing that is knowing we would send twenty right back at them eliminating their entire country. But if we keep pushing them as we have been to the point where they think we are going to attack them no matter what they do like we did with Iraq, then they will have nothing to lose because they know they can't win a conventional war against us.
And the even bigger threat is China, who has been the number one threat on the U.S. military's list for a very long time now and which is waiting for the exact right moment to seize back Taiwan from its independent status. With Bush's fucked up cowboy, "Bring it on" attitude, he could very easily provoke the Chinese in just the right way to taking that step and then we are obligated to support and defend Taiwan in a war that would, despite our advanced technology, be very difficult to win conventionally and if it goes nuclear, there is no doubt that not only does China have nuclear weapons, but we also know for sure they can hit us with them.
So when you hear all these politicians and bloggers and political writers/hacks out there spinning the facts up to paint their side of the truth, don't just ignore the spin...look through it and think truly about what it means. Why are they pushing this point...what is their pathetic, personal motivation for dishonestly over-emphasizing something, because remember that these people are truly only interested in their own interests. Don't get me wrong, Kerry will probably be all about helping himself too but at least he is not as simple-minded as Bush is and he knows how to get what he wants without turning the whole world against us.
On that point I am going to be clear about my motivations: I don't know how others see it but when I think of being a parent, that is my most important job and that means I have to think a bit more ahead about the future I am leaving for them. My motivation right now is to give them the brightest future to come into that I can. Right now I am absolutely convinced that another four years with Bush will seriously hurt the future of my children and of all children around the world for many more years to come.
I apologize again for a long post but I have had four weeks of listening to news on television and seeing the bias people put on every single event in the world. It disgusts me and if it is this bad now then I am truly worried about what my kids are going to have to deal with....lets hope we are smart enough to put black/white, red/blue, republican/democrat bullshit aside and common sense prevails in November...