The last U.S. Combat Brigade has left Iraq and…well, it’s been a little anti-climatic. I think of the thousands of people who stopped traffic on Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue here in Chicago to protest the war in Iraq and I wonder where all those people are now? You’d think they’d be…I dunno? Excited? Happy? Triumphant?
But no. Those people have mostly moved on to other causes I suppose. Or, maybe they wised up a bit when their hero the Super O told them what the previous administration did: That you just can’t pick up and leave—that the consequences to that would be worse than the consequences to our staying there.
Americans are a bit spoiled in that we’ve never had war brought to our shores aside from 9/11 and a few isolated incidents during WWII. War is a video game to us, or a movie. That’s our reference point. So, ending a war seems like a simple enough thing to do. Choose a few face saving words of bravery, save that last little child, board the waiting chopper and take off looking back at the war torn land you’re leaving as the credits roll. Done. Right?
Not so.
Back when people were lining the major streets of our cities and the mother of a soldier who was killed in Iraq was camping out just outside the Bush ranch in Texas all people could talk about was how this was a war for oil. And make no mistake, there were people in our president’s ear who had personal financial gain on their minds when they applauded his choice to take war to Iraq, but it was never a war for oil. It was a war for revenge.
The question is who had the revenge right of way? From the point of view of most Americans, we did. They flew planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon! Of course, they saw it differently. They felt like revenge was their right because 20 years earlier we used them to fight a war against the Russians—a war they won for us and then once it was over, we left them to rot in the war torn wasteland where they won. Sons grew up without fathers. Life was hard. Sure, they could have blamed the enemy—the Russians, but that’s the enemy! The bad guys! They are supposed to be evil!
So, it was their “friends” who they chose to blame. That would be us. And our evil is fact. We used them and left them to suffer the consequences. That didn’t give them the right to do what they did. Attacking civilians is wrong and cowardly, but even that distinction is open to interpretation. During the war in Afghanistan against the Russians, bombs were left that resembled toys so that children would pick them up and be killed. During that war, there was no such thing as a civilian.
In fact, Afghanistan was so thoroughly destroyed that 20 years later when the fatherless sons of that war struck out for vengeance, their country wasn’t recovered enough to fight back against. We needed a figurehead. We needed someone we could fight. Iraq was in up to their necks—but behind the scenes, like the CIA in the war between Afghanistan and Russia. We chose them as our target. They were a public relations target more than anything. Sadaam was someone we could bring down. Oedipus could be satisfied when Georgie Jr. proved to his mommy that he was a bigger man that daddy. There was an actual country there that we could liberate—and they did need liberating.
It was a win-win proposition. The American people, too ignorant of their own history, just wanted some blood. We wanted to believe in WMD’s and all the rest. Of course, the problem was that after Shocked and Awed the hell out of them, beat their army, took their evil leader prisoner and later executed him that our original enemy entered the vacuum to fill the space that the Iraqi government had previously occupied.
We found ourselves fighting the very people we trained to defeat the Russians, on their turf, the very same turf that the USSR couldn’t defeat them on—only it was worse. At least the USSR could leave bombs for kids to set off and target people—military or civilian—indiscriminately. We had to fight our war on television. We had to win hearts and minds. It was a no-win situation.
The political pressure that ensued led to our electing a president who promised to get our troops out of Iraq. It’s taken him a year and a half to do it. And here’s the rub: We’ve left a power vacuum once again. The fledgling Iraqi government is too corrupt and too weak and too divided to stand. It will fail. Power will fall into the hands of the most ruthless and evil. Fear will be their weapon. No American President will do anything about it, because the American people want no part of Iraq and to do so would be political suicide.
And so the fatherless sons of this war will rise up and strike out at our own children. Here’s hoping that before they act, before they take to the streets to protest, that they understand their history and they know the truth of what has transpired.
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George W. Bush. Show all posts
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Monday, January 12, 2009
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!
George W. Bush gave his final press conference today as President of the United States of America and I, for one (and I could be alone here), will miss him. For someone who enjoys writing as much I do, with a humorous spin whenever possible, Bush has been a godsend that won’t easily be replaced. It makes for a good time to look back upon his Presidency though, and to look forward to what lies ahead for our next President.
From the point of view of a humorist, Bush’s many faux pas and foibles have been vitamin rich in opportunities to ridicule and torment. Rarely has a week gone by in the past 5 or 6 years when he hasn’t done something worthy of a jab or a dig. From his mispronounifications of words to his goofy grins and expressions, Bush has provided a continuous and ever-present butt for any and all jokers.
From the point of a political analy st, the loss is equally as significant. Right or wrong, regardless of which side of any particular issue you may have come down on, Bush has provided lots of fodder for debate, discussion and in many cases, blatant outrage. His policies and procedures have been in almost constant question since he took office. He has been at the center of political and social debate for eight long years now and it’s been a full eight years with a seemingly nonstop train of issues and consequences.
What I’ll miss the most about him though is the ignorance. Not his ignorance, but the absolute and blissful ignorance the American public, and the world at large for that matter, had regarding his decisions, actions and politics. I think that Bush, unlike anyone before and as no one in the foreseeable future has been the president of perception.
To many, he has been a clown prince and political buffoon. He has been the scapegoat for many things that have happened which were far beyond his control. To many, any decision he has ever made has been completely and unquestionably indefensible. His detractors are many and they almost uniformly fail to find a single good thing to say about him, or point out a single good thing he’s ever done.
This, of course, is ridiculous. Not liking a president is one thing, not agreeing with him more often than not is certainly understandable, but President Bush has been vilified to an alarming and unbelievable extent. There are actual people who side against certain issues just because Bush favors them—regardless of the facts. I can’t think of a single idea that more fervently betrays democracy than that one.
I happen to believe that history will much kinder to Bush than we have been. I imagine he’ll be long gone before anyone will care to look at his presidency objectively, but an objective eye is going to see that the past eight years have been a failing of the governed, far more than they have been a failure of the government.
I don’t mean to come off as a defender of President Bush. I’m afraid that his second term has been a disaster and that much of the criticism he’s gotten has been warranted. The idea that everything he’s done has been bad, that he’s a bad person, that he’s evil, that he’s manipulated the people and the government for personal gain and personal reasons is simply foolish. How quickly and conveniently we forget that there are three branches to government. How quickly and conveniently we forget that we elect the officials who preside over that government.
The most glaring part of the past eight years is the absolute lack of culpability the American people have felt. Some will point out the disputed results of the 2004 election without giving a thought to the fact that had things gone the other way, those results would have been as justly disputed as they stand now. They use that election as a get out of jail free card for all that has happened since, pointing out that their ability to affect change was stolen from them, making it convenient to give up entirely on the political process.
And that, in a nutshell is the problem. Democracy is founded on the principle of a fighting people, a people so hungry for freedom and justice that they would stop at nothing to see to it that those ideals were consistently perpetrated. We are a lazy people though and find it much easier to whine than to do when things go against what we want.
Over the past eight years, ignorance has reigned, not in the seat of the Presidency, but in the minds of the people. The most common ignorant idea is that the war in Iraq is entirely about oil, yet while every and any anti-Bush propagandist uses this as a staple of their beliefs, I’ve yet to find a single person who can explain to me the actual benefit or gain that Bush hoped to achieve in this Oil War. I’ve yet to find an adequate explanation as to why the vote to go to war in Iraq was so lopsided? The Senate, working from the same false intelligence that Bush did voted overwhelmingly to go to war, and have escaped any and all culpability for that action.
Again, it is not my intention to let Bush off, but I have to wonder why he alone faces the consequences of that decision? I have to wonder why he takes the blame for poor intelligence? I have to wonder why he alone takes the blame for the poor military strategy we took? The indictment should have reached into our military, our intelligence community, the two other branches of executive government and to the citizenry, but it never has and until a far removed historian is able to look back at the times, probably never will.
In the end, the same things that made him such a convenient target to humorists made him an easy scapegoat for all that went wrong. Our forefathers specifically created a government where one person could not rule as the monarchs of Europe once did, but that never stopped us from lopping every imaginable blame for any possible problem in the lap of one man.
Worse, we now assign the task of making everything all better in the lap of our next President. We don’t want to participate, we want someone to wave a wand and make it all better. The expectations and hopes for President Elect Obama are so incredibly unfair that it’s staggering. His election has many crying out against some of his ideas that lean towards Socialism, but what we should all be worrying about is the very real threat and reality that we are so unappreciative of our liberties that we are willing to allow them to be taken from us.
Say, for instance that Obama works miracles and turns things around quickly. Say that he leads us to four and then eight years of prosperity. Say that the country is happy and fat and content under his Presidency. Say that older generations die and younger generations replace them and the day comes when a choice is given to us about the possibility of allowing a president a 3rd term because we are so happy with him—then even a 4th.
Such a short step it would be to absolute p ower, to dictatorship, to monarch rule. If we are so willing to place blame on one man as our scapegoat, surely we are equally willing to place glory at the feet of another as our savior. The precipice at which we stand is a precarious one. We fail to remember our history—a history of scapegoats, appeasement and absolute power that led to genocide as recently as World War II—and one false step could leave us doomed to repeat it.
Say what you will about George W. Bush as our President. Say what you will about Barack Obama as our next. But please, understand that no one person could ever screw it all up, or put it all back together again. If you believe either of those things is possible, you are a fool, you are ignorant, you the problem. Our government allows only one finger to every be justly pointed in blame, and that is our thumb—opposable, supposed proof of evolution, and yet curiously absent in this discussio n, as are the lessons of history, begging the question, just how evolved are we really?
From the point of view of a humorist, Bush’s many faux pas and foibles have been vitamin rich in opportunities to ridicule and torment. Rarely has a week gone by in the past 5 or 6 years when he hasn’t done something worthy of a jab or a dig. From his mispronounifications of words to his goofy grins and expressions, Bush has provided a continuous and ever-present butt for any and all jokers.
From the point of a political analy st, the loss is equally as significant. Right or wrong, regardless of which side of any particular issue you may have come down on, Bush has provided lots of fodder for debate, discussion and in many cases, blatant outrage. His policies and procedures have been in almost constant question since he took office. He has been at the center of political and social debate for eight long years now and it’s been a full eight years with a seemingly nonstop train of issues and consequences.
What I’ll miss the most about him though is the ignorance. Not his ignorance, but the absolute and blissful ignorance the American public, and the world at large for that matter, had regarding his decisions, actions and politics. I think that Bush, unlike anyone before and as no one in the foreseeable future has been the president of perception.
To many, he has been a clown prince and political buffoon. He has been the scapegoat for many things that have happened which were far beyond his control. To many, any decision he has ever made has been completely and unquestionably indefensible. His detractors are many and they almost uniformly fail to find a single good thing to say about him, or point out a single good thing he’s ever done.
This, of course, is ridiculous. Not liking a president is one thing, not agreeing with him more often than not is certainly understandable, but President Bush has been vilified to an alarming and unbelievable extent. There are actual people who side against certain issues just because Bush favors them—regardless of the facts. I can’t think of a single idea that more fervently betrays democracy than that one.
I happen to believe that history will much kinder to Bush than we have been. I imagine he’ll be long gone before anyone will care to look at his presidency objectively, but an objective eye is going to see that the past eight years have been a failing of the governed, far more than they have been a failure of the government.
I don’t mean to come off as a defender of President Bush. I’m afraid that his second term has been a disaster and that much of the criticism he’s gotten has been warranted. The idea that everything he’s done has been bad, that he’s a bad person, that he’s evil, that he’s manipulated the people and the government for personal gain and personal reasons is simply foolish. How quickly and conveniently we forget that there are three branches to government. How quickly and conveniently we forget that we elect the officials who preside over that government.
The most glaring part of the past eight years is the absolute lack of culpability the American people have felt. Some will point out the disputed results of the 2004 election without giving a thought to the fact that had things gone the other way, those results would have been as justly disputed as they stand now. They use that election as a get out of jail free card for all that has happened since, pointing out that their ability to affect change was stolen from them, making it convenient to give up entirely on the political process.
And that, in a nutshell is the problem. Democracy is founded on the principle of a fighting people, a people so hungry for freedom and justice that they would stop at nothing to see to it that those ideals were consistently perpetrated. We are a lazy people though and find it much easier to whine than to do when things go against what we want.
Over the past eight years, ignorance has reigned, not in the seat of the Presidency, but in the minds of the people. The most common ignorant idea is that the war in Iraq is entirely about oil, yet while every and any anti-Bush propagandist uses this as a staple of their beliefs, I’ve yet to find a single person who can explain to me the actual benefit or gain that Bush hoped to achieve in this Oil War. I’ve yet to find an adequate explanation as to why the vote to go to war in Iraq was so lopsided? The Senate, working from the same false intelligence that Bush did voted overwhelmingly to go to war, and have escaped any and all culpability for that action.
Again, it is not my intention to let Bush off, but I have to wonder why he alone faces the consequences of that decision? I have to wonder why he takes the blame for poor intelligence? I have to wonder why he alone takes the blame for the poor military strategy we took? The indictment should have reached into our military, our intelligence community, the two other branches of executive government and to the citizenry, but it never has and until a far removed historian is able to look back at the times, probably never will.
In the end, the same things that made him such a convenient target to humorists made him an easy scapegoat for all that went wrong. Our forefathers specifically created a government where one person could not rule as the monarchs of Europe once did, but that never stopped us from lopping every imaginable blame for any possible problem in the lap of one man.
Worse, we now assign the task of making everything all better in the lap of our next President. We don’t want to participate, we want someone to wave a wand and make it all better. The expectations and hopes for President Elect Obama are so incredibly unfair that it’s staggering. His election has many crying out against some of his ideas that lean towards Socialism, but what we should all be worrying about is the very real threat and reality that we are so unappreciative of our liberties that we are willing to allow them to be taken from us.
Say, for instance that Obama works miracles and turns things around quickly. Say that he leads us to four and then eight years of prosperity. Say that the country is happy and fat and content under his Presidency. Say that older generations die and younger generations replace them and the day comes when a choice is given to us about the possibility of allowing a president a 3rd term because we are so happy with him—then even a 4th.
Such a short step it would be to absolute p ower, to dictatorship, to monarch rule. If we are so willing to place blame on one man as our scapegoat, surely we are equally willing to place glory at the feet of another as our savior. The precipice at which we stand is a precarious one. We fail to remember our history—a history of scapegoats, appeasement and absolute power that led to genocide as recently as World War II—and one false step could leave us doomed to repeat it.
Say what you will about George W. Bush as our President. Say what you will about Barack Obama as our next. But please, understand that no one person could ever screw it all up, or put it all back together again. If you believe either of those things is possible, you are a fool, you are ignorant, you the problem. Our government allows only one finger to every be justly pointed in blame, and that is our thumb—opposable, supposed proof of evolution, and yet curiously absent in this discussio n, as are the lessons of history, begging the question, just how evolved are we really?
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Fingers and Thumbs
One of the things I’m looking forward to, now that Barack Obama has been elected President, is to see how the blame game changes. Now that the election is over and the lipstick bulldog and the senile old guy have been defeated, even those of us who voted for Obama can admit. The guy is severely under-qualified for this position!
I mean, seriously people, one term as a senator (incomplete) and community organizer. That’s hardly a resume made for Presidency. And that’s okay, that’s good in fact, we need someone who isn’t too caught up in the game to run the show for a while, but it also means that he is going to make mistakes, possibly huge ones.
Obviously, when he does, the right wing is going to try to put the blame directly on him. That’s not interesting though. Everyone knows that’s going to happen. What I’m curious about is how all these people who blame George W. Bush for every little thing are going to have to say.
Blaming W has become something of a sport. The Senate and House almost unanimously vote to go to war based on the evidence presented that there are Weapons of Mass Destruction, but when it’s proven that there aren’t, W was treated like a monarch who had made the call independently of everyone else. And that’s just one example. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not coming to the defense of President Bush. I truly believe he puts the Lame in Lame Duck President, but I’m really looking forward to the outpouring of hypocrisy that’s about to come down.
I also like, support and voted for Barack Obama, but screw ups are inevitable on the part of this young President. We live in a difficult and dangerous time. Mistakes will happen. And when they do, I can’t help but wonder if every time there is one, if the masses will take to the blogs and the message boards to holler at the moon about them?
I wonder if anything will be his fault? I wonder for how long people will be able to look back and blame W. From my perspective, the 9/11 tragedy can be pinned squarely on President William Jefferson Clinton and his foreign policy decisions, but I never hear anyone talking about that though. I do hear 9/11 being blamed on Bush though.
The thing is that George W. Bush is, was, and always will be an easy target. Even the politically ignorant can have a go at old Georgie boy. He’s the slow kid in the back of the class who almost seems to beg to be picked on. We’ve certainly obliged him. I read a lot of blogs and rarely does a week go by that someone isn’t trashing him—usually in an uninformed way.
This isn’t a defense of Bush or an attack on Obama. This is a simple question: Are we, as a nation, going to hold Obama to the same standard of perfection by which we now judge Bush? Let’s face it, a lot of the criticism Bush got and gets has been warranted, but we do not and never have lived in a monarchy. One man alone does not rule our country. While the President is certainly the figure head of our government, he does not have the power to act alone.
And moving forward, I wonder how this blame game will change? Certainly, Bush will be blamed for messes that arise long after he’s out of office—some justified, others not. Certainly, the Republicans will try to pin as many problems to Obama as they can in an effort to win in 2012. But what about, “We the People?” Who will we blame?
In a country where we are supposed to have a voice and rarely take one, we stood up and found that voice to elect Obama. His successes will surely be our own. We will extend thumbs, pointed back at ourselves and with a wink to tell anyone who will listen that we voted for him every single time he does something, in which we can take pride.
Who will get to own his mistakes though? We never use our thumbs to point out failure. At least we haven’t the past eight years. We’ll be using our index fingers when errors are made. At whom will we point them?
I mean, seriously people, one term as a senator (incomplete) and community organizer. That’s hardly a resume made for Presidency. And that’s okay, that’s good in fact, we need someone who isn’t too caught up in the game to run the show for a while, but it also means that he is going to make mistakes, possibly huge ones.
Obviously, when he does, the right wing is going to try to put the blame directly on him. That’s not interesting though. Everyone knows that’s going to happen. What I’m curious about is how all these people who blame George W. Bush for every little thing are going to have to say.
Blaming W has become something of a sport. The Senate and House almost unanimously vote to go to war based on the evidence presented that there are Weapons of Mass Destruction, but when it’s proven that there aren’t, W was treated like a monarch who had made the call independently of everyone else. And that’s just one example. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not coming to the defense of President Bush. I truly believe he puts the Lame in Lame Duck President, but I’m really looking forward to the outpouring of hypocrisy that’s about to come down.
I also like, support and voted for Barack Obama, but screw ups are inevitable on the part of this young President. We live in a difficult and dangerous time. Mistakes will happen. And when they do, I can’t help but wonder if every time there is one, if the masses will take to the blogs and the message boards to holler at the moon about them?
I wonder if anything will be his fault? I wonder for how long people will be able to look back and blame W. From my perspective, the 9/11 tragedy can be pinned squarely on President William Jefferson Clinton and his foreign policy decisions, but I never hear anyone talking about that though. I do hear 9/11 being blamed on Bush though.
The thing is that George W. Bush is, was, and always will be an easy target. Even the politically ignorant can have a go at old Georgie boy. He’s the slow kid in the back of the class who almost seems to beg to be picked on. We’ve certainly obliged him. I read a lot of blogs and rarely does a week go by that someone isn’t trashing him—usually in an uninformed way.
This isn’t a defense of Bush or an attack on Obama. This is a simple question: Are we, as a nation, going to hold Obama to the same standard of perfection by which we now judge Bush? Let’s face it, a lot of the criticism Bush got and gets has been warranted, but we do not and never have lived in a monarchy. One man alone does not rule our country. While the President is certainly the figure head of our government, he does not have the power to act alone.
And moving forward, I wonder how this blame game will change? Certainly, Bush will be blamed for messes that arise long after he’s out of office—some justified, others not. Certainly, the Republicans will try to pin as many problems to Obama as they can in an effort to win in 2012. But what about, “We the People?” Who will we blame?
In a country where we are supposed to have a voice and rarely take one, we stood up and found that voice to elect Obama. His successes will surely be our own. We will extend thumbs, pointed back at ourselves and with a wink to tell anyone who will listen that we voted for him every single time he does something, in which we can take pride.
Who will get to own his mistakes though? We never use our thumbs to point out failure. At least we haven’t the past eight years. We’ll be using our index fingers when errors are made. At whom will we point them?
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