In the past few months, it has been increasingly apparent that those in opposition to the Iraq War were correct in many of their accusations, assumptions, assertions and occasionally assinine animadversions.
The seemingly unquenchable spread of the falsity of the 9/11-Iraq connection was fueled by an ignorance eventually drowned in the autocracy of that pesky "AND" operator: Saddam is evil AND Osama is evil AND they hated each other. When WMDs turned out to be a fanciful cock-and-bull story, the imminent threat of Iraq was revealed as merely the foul squeakings of a crusty dictactor whose armpit-pumping-noise-diplomacy consistently made our hairs stand on end. Our collective mind was wracked with a million unanswered "What-If" questions. What if Iraq nukes Milwaukie and
cuts off our beer supply? What if they give us some perpetual stuffy noses incurable by chicken soup or Tylenol? What if they make us eat
unholy foods? What if they've developed
terrorist superlasers? And the sharks! O! The genetically modified sharks! How will they be deployed? Clearly on some sort of terrorist camel? "
How prepared is your family?" asked those poised to profit most on our queasiness.
We searched the darkness for faces. We sought the ever-lurking danger, that terrorist you knew was sitting in that Laz-E-Boy in the corner, the seat still warm from that communist who got up to die from irrelevance. Alas! Paranoia is a weed needing constant fear as fertilizer, a sprinkling of water, and a lot of attention.
So we rolled over and went to sleep, dreaming! dreaming! dreaming! Democracy, utopia, the will of people never contradicted by the whims of a despot. Our national pancreas quivered in distress at the relentless sugar-sweet assault of self-aggrandizing glurge. Arms outstretched, we would be the saviors of an afflicted, sinful people. The wailing of Abu Gharaib's tortured inhabitants awoke first the Iraqis, then the Americans. We had a mean streak.
An eye for an eye, we bravely defended. A tooth for a tooth. If you bomb me, I'll bomb you, plus some other people, who will then bomb more people, recursively until we're all sufficiently dead, at which point we will retire to the smoking room and discuss the indignities of a gentleman's life. As the Klingons and the French before them agreed, revenge is a dish best served cold. Which made it all the more curious when we served it to the wrong table half-microwaved and covered in day-old mayonnaise. Jesus would be proud.
No matter. It would be complete soon enough. Stay the course. Keep on truckin'. A half-assed demi-democracy would still be superior to the unmitigated suffering of Saddam's tyranny.
Unless, of course, Iraq turned into an Islamic theocracy. I am reminded of the introduction to Batman Returns, in which the stunned, disgusted parents of Oswald Copperpot peer, horrified, at their freakish baby. They furtively push Oswald's baby carriage into a stream leading to the sewers and an slightly-too-long intro sequence as the carriage and its occupant are transported around its new home.
No doubt Iraq's diminishing justification is a large factor in Bush's precipitous approval rating slide.
Looking at this graph, a couple of things pop into my mind. First, there are altogether too many people working on polls. Couldn't we employ these guys creating a new lane of I-405?
Secondly, you guys are all idiots. By "you," I mean the world. And by the world, I mean American citizens who get polled. Talk about a flip flop. It took you THIS long to figure this stuff out?
Thirdly, millions, possibly billions of dollars of PR could only buy the little bow shaped increase at the end. Which, of course, was enough for re-election. Perhaps money well-spent, but look at the trajectory prior to Gulf War II. That would have been fatal.
Having not supported nor voted for Bush, I guess I could be glad that the president's approval rating is only slightly higher than Nixon's. I guess I could be happy that the religious right has started to show its true colors. I guess I could be cheerful about Americans feeling less safe and less confident. I could even start to see hope that the corrupt and immoral (but so gosh-darn righteous) folks who run all three branches of the government will be displaced by more honorable counterparts.
Ultimately that win would be the result of a loss, and that loss affects us all. All Americans are now undoubtedly going to be (and/or continue to be) affected negatively by the Iraq war. The smug told-ya-so-isms I hear are no consolation. Even the backlash, if it comes, against the stubborn and sinister conservative forces that brought about this set of events will be as Dr Bunson Honeydew puts it, "sadly temporary". The lasting effects of the war will be instability in the middle east followed directly by a strengthened Islamic Fundamentalist social movement which could now realisticaly geographically assemble itself into an empire, and a sense of unease at using our military. I bring this last point up because we may just need to fight these enemies we're creating now, some day later. Scarlett O'Hara is probably rolling in her fictional grave.
Oswald Copperpot, if you remember, ends up living with penguins and becoming an evil, if misunderstood, fish-eating threat to the safety of the citizens of Gotham. We're the people who tried to tell Oswald's parents that's probably not a good idea to take all those fertility drugs while drinking radioactive gin-and-tonics. You'll end up with an evil monster baby. Applause now is probably not the correct reaction. Where's Batman when you need him?