Cody
Williams
The Emperor's New Set of Eyes
by Cody Williams
If the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina's siege of New Orleans was an example of the Bush Administration's failed domestic policies then today's Iraq is an example of its failed international policies. It will take years to undo the devastation to the Gulf Coast Katrina wrought. It may take the world decades to overcome the devastation wreaked as a result of this Iraqi war.
On the march up to the president's preemptive evasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein administration officials waxed poetic about spreading democracy through that region of the world, starting at the Persian Gulf and marching through Iraq, Afghanistan, then Syria and Lebanon and finally, possibly, with God's help, Iran. Militarily it was supposed to be as gingerly a stroll as a barefoot romp on a Mississippi beach front. Topple tyranny here. Crush Islamic fascism there. Put away the Taliban. Hang Saddam. Liberate Islamic veiled and faceless woman and bring Thomas Jefferson style universal suffrage to the land of mullahs, sheiks and daily beheadings.
With its altruistic mission accomplished the payoff for the entire world economy was wrested control of the world's largest oil reserves from a ruthless power hungry dictator who had murdered thousands of his own people.
Using the victorious basketball analogy, the plan was a 'slam dunk,' Bush was assured. After all, we are the world's sole surviving super power. We'd be uncontested. We have the mightiest army and the most advanced military technology to have ever existed. Our 'Shock and Awe' march would start in the spring of 2003 and our boys, after being greeted at the gates of Baghdad with roses and palm branches as liberators could be home by Christmas with a minimum amount of casualties.
Iraq is an ugly mess that will take years to clean up. The world is less secure because we went there. Nations that sympathized with the US after the heinous 9/11 attacks now celebrate our defeats. Nations fearful of US aggression look to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. The Arab and Christian worlds are at distant odds now more than the two cultures have been since Queen Isabella expelled the Moors from Andalusia in the 1400s.
George Bush insisted on a new Iraqi war when other options were available. The raid on Baghdad abruptly ended international diplomatic efforts aimed to curtail Hussein. Bush was warned by his then Secretary of State, Collin Powell, "If you break it, you own it." He frightened the American people into believing Hussein's Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. It didn't. He used manipulated data in a State of the Union speech to suggest the world was threatened if we did not go to war. He has convinced us that Iraqi shop owners, school teachers and handymen fighting to defend their homeland and families were Al Qaeda "insurgents" who next would have Ohio, Macon Georgia, Barstow California and Las Vegas in the crosshairs of their terrorist ambitions. He has convinced US troops that they are defending, and dying for, to sustain the American Way of Life.
Now after his party's 'thumping' in the midterm election he has removed the architect of the war, Donald Rumsfeld and has put out a call for a set of 'fresh eyes' that can come up with suggestions that may get us out of this mess; no, his mess. He waded the world into deep dodo and it stinks. Soldiers are dying by the hundreds each month and that region of the world has become so unstable that religious fanaticism, nuclear threat and Western hatred have combined into a real toxic threat, a real weapon of mass destruction. The fear he used to justify his war has actually become his self-fulfilled prophesy.
I remember well three, maybe four days into the Katrina disaster becoming so frustrated at the TV images showing governmental ineptness, seeing people in our own country on rooftops begging for days to be rescued as the bloated corpses of their neighbors floated by, that I screamed to anyone who would listen, "Do something to help them, damn it. Just do something,"
I am just as frustrated watching as our countrymen and women are being killed and maimed fighting in a land that is not theirs for a people who does not want them there, for a cause that was never real.
Here, Mr. Bush. Use my eyes. Baghdad does not want to be Toledo.
Someone, somewhere in Washington has to have a clue that this president's incompetence is our ruin.
Do something, damn it!
The new Democratic controlled congress must end this Bush nightmare too, and as soon as it can! And they can't let him off the hook. He should be made to give account for his mishandling of this affair.
© www.codywilliams.com 2006
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