Okay my friends. You remember the Reagan years, when we were supposed to hate the welfare queen and the loser who used food stamps to buy orange juice to mix with his vodka. These cute little fictional anecdotes delivered by our movie-actor president didn’t amount to class war. Class war is when someone points out that the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans resembles 1929.
But we are a generous people. Especially when we decide to fight evildoers there so we don’t have to fight them here. We don’t hesitate to sacrifice our best and brightest to defend freedom for people we only knew existed after 9/11. Anyone who read the papers and looked at a map knew that 15 of the 19 hijackerswere from Saudi Arabia, but the US has too many business interests there to mess things up with a war. Today we are in Iraq.
The pro-war people ask the question–"Would you want Saddam to still be in power?" Well, as an anti-war person I have an answer, but it won’t fit on a sound byte -- it takes some thinking.
If this were February of 2003, and you knew what this war would become, would you support invading Iraq? If you were listening to the news in 2003, when Mohammed AlBaredei, the United Nations Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency said that there was no evidence for weapons of mass destruction, would you vote to let the UN weapons inspectors continue to do their job? Would you ask our President to have intensive talks with Turkey, one of our allies, whose people in a democratic vote refused to let their country be used as a military base for the invasion? Would you sacrifice your own, or someone else’s family member, to invade Iraq because they had an awful dictator? Or would you have tried to work with the resistance in Iraq and the UN to let the Iraqis get rid of their own dictator?
Before the war, a commentator compared the dictatorship in Iraq to a building where an innocent child was being raped. Wouldn’t any decent person want to charge into that building and rescue that child? Well, at the time I was working in a high-rise. I had a vivid image of what a real building looks like.
Imagine a building with a hundred apartments. Many of the tenants speak a language you don’t understand. People are so afraid of crime in that building that they’ve removed their names and numbers from the doors. It’s a poor building, people mistrust the authorities. There are many children, some undocumented. Would you go in with guns blazing? How many innocent tenants would you kill if you did? How many children?
America is paying for a huge mistake. This was supposed to be a cakewalk, we were supposed to have a base in the mideast and all the cheap oil we needed. This was not about self-defense. Osama Bin Laden, is still out there somewhere, or maybe he is dead and someone else has taken his place. If we are fighting a ‘war on terrorism’ maybe we should consider the possibility that a tactic doesn’t need a central authority. Our own plague of shooting/suicides should tell us that. Violence doesn’t need a nation, it just needs a motivation.
But back to that story about the undeserving welfare queen we hate so much. We’re good at trashing our own, we’re good at looking down on our fellow Americans who’ve made BAD CHOICES. Let’s look at recent news developments.
- Members of our volunteer army, who’ve already given again and again, are being called to extended tours of duty. The Parliament of Iraq is going on a two month vacation.
- Our own President has taken more vacation timethan any of his predecessors, in spite of being a ‘wartime president’. Lots of brush to cut at the ranch.
- Working Americans are one layoff away from losing their health insurance, working two jobs to pay the rent.
We could all use a two month vacation. No one signed on to give their first-born son for anything but the defense of our country after all other options have failed. If we were really under attack, there would be long lines at the recruiting centers, a tax increase and rationing. This isn’t a just war, this is buy now, pay later. When the bill comes due, the current occupant of the White House will be long gone. His children, Barbara and Jenna, can count on cushy jobs with Halliburton in Dubai. It’s we who are paying now and our children who will pay later. And God help the innocent civilians of Iraq, who needed political help, but now find themselves on the front lines of a civil war.