Monday, February 16, 2004

 
GEORGE W. BUSH THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS.
External link: http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx

I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the world, but there's a lot of stuff about this war in Iraq that is absolutely through the looking glass, and nobody's talking about it, and I don't get it.

First, people ARE talking about the fact that we were told that we had to risk American lives, and kill thousands of Iraqis in order to protect ourselves from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But everyone keeps saying that it's a bad thing that we didn't find any WMD. Well, I say, thank god there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even without any, we're looking at, as I write this, 643 dead Americans, and 3,040 seriously wounded (e.g., missing arms and legs). As bad as that number is, it would have been a whole lot higher if Iraq had had the sort of arsenal of WMD that president Bush said they did. What if he really did have chemical weapons and buckets of anthrax? How many Americans would be dead then? Instead of asking why we picked a fight with a defenseless foe, we'd be asking why we picked a fight with such a well-defended foe. Iraq isn't another Vietnam, but if Iraq were as well-armed as we thought they were, then it might have been.

But, since there apparently are no WMD to be found in Iraq, we have now been told that the real reason we went was to install democracy in Iraq. Now, suppose Bush had said at the outset that this country is defenseless and harmless, but we prefer to change their form of government to a different one, so we're going to send over a hundred thousand Americans over there, hundreds of them will be killed, thousands more will be injured, and tens of thousands of Iraqis will be killed, including thousands of civilians, and all this at a cost of a hundred billion dollars to US taxpayers. Would we have gone for that? Would that have happened? There was a case to be made for it, but I don't think it would have been popular.

But even granting that our reason for going over there was, all along, to instill democracy, then why won't the US let them vote? The US unilaterally appointed a governing counsel to unilaterally write their Constitution, and now the Bush administration is insisting on so-called "caucuses" instead of direct elections, arguing, among other things, that Iraq is "not ready" for democracy, and there couldn't be a direct election, anyway, since no one has taken a census yet. And you know what? The Bush administration is a hundred percent right! We can't possibly let the Iraqis vote for whoever they want, because if we did, then they'd all vote for people who would do everything possible to destroy America, because that's what the Iraqi people want. So, I definitely support the Bush administrations decision NOT to allow democratic elections in Iraq. But, then, what are we doing there?

But here's the REALLY crazy part. Bush is on the defensive right now about his service in the National Guard, and how that contrasts with Kerry's service in Vietnam. And he keeps saying that it's wrong for people to criticize his National Guard service, because there are people in that same National Guard who are fighting right now in Iraq. Am I the only person in the world who understands the words coming out of Bush's mouth? George W. Bush is saying that even though he used political influence to join the National Guard in order to avoid serving in Vietnam, back when 99.96% of the National Guard did not have to participate in combat, we should not criticize him for doing that, because NOW, scores of National Guardsmen are being killed in Iraq, because HE, GEORGE W. BUSH, sent them there to die. It's like if George W. Bush was hiding in bunker while people were outside fighting for the country, and then he murdered all the other people who were hiding in the bunker with him, and then he said that we shouldn't criticize him for hiding in a bunker, since hiding in a bunker is so dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that all the other people in the bunker with him got murdered. That is exactly analogous to what Bush is saying, and it is completely topsy turvy. It's just like the parable of the boy who murders his parents, and then pleads for sympathy because he is an orphan!

And in the end, it doesn't really matter whether he showed up to his National Guard duty nor not or whether he lied about it. The important thing is that he used his political connections to get into the National Guard to avoid the draft, so that someone else could be sent to fight, and perhaps to die, in his place. And the only reason that matters is that I honestly do not believe that Bush would have been so quick to send so many people to war, if he had ever experienced it for himself.

This is The Official Record. 9:25 PM
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2004/02/george-w-bush-through-looking-glass.html


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