The United States of America has arguably never been in as bad a state as it now is. I know, the Great Depression and the Big War. Well, I was around as the nation was still crawling out from under the stock market crash and then when my country entered the war to fight the Germans and Japanese and Italians on the other side of the world. But I was a little young to be able to appreciate the enormity of those events.
I can remember playing house with my sister and making ration stamps with crayons and tablet paper to take to our play grocery store. Green for vegetables, brown for meat. Forget sugar. There wasn’t any at the corner market that week.
I lost two uncles in World War II. I was very small and remember all the adults crying and looking sad. Something bad had happened.
My dad was in the National Guard but did not have to go to war. We actually kept some weekend warriors here then to protect the homeland. There were air raid drills during which I would hide under the waterfall dresser in my parent’s bedroom. Don’t know why I felt safe there but I did. I knew there was some horrible thing going on somewhere in the great world and that the Germans and Japanese and Italians were part of it and that the sirens meant they might drop bombs on us. But I felt safe under that dresser. Safe from the Germans and the Japanese and the Italians, safe while the sirens were sounding and the shades were drawn and the lights were off and the adults were sitting in the living room and the air raid marshals were knocking on the door. The adults did not seem to be afraid. They talked quietly and waited till the all clear was sounded and then they would go back to telling foxhole jokes and listening to 78rpm records and I would come out from under the dresser.
This was the war with the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians to a four year old. George Bush has no feeling for that history. And today a four-year-old and his/her family have more to fear from George Bush than they do from squadrons of bombers droning overhead raining down megatons of destruction on American cities.
For what we have now is not a war to save the world from fascism or Nazism but Bush’s war, the “War on Terror”,a never-ending, nebulous, terror-inducing, war on the American people. It is a war designed, not just to produce profits for multinational arms and oil dealers and to, in misguided judgment, satisfy the security needs of Israel, but to terrorize and tame the spirit of the American people. To terrorize us out of our freedoms and our constitutional rights and to attempt to cede power to one-party rule. That does not sound like the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt but more like one or more of dictators of this nation’s adversaries in the Great War.
Iraq is a war Bush has fraudulently created, criminally mismanaged, refused to abandon or to admit his egregious errors in connection with. It has no link to the events of 911, none, zilch, nada. Nothing except that Bush callously used those events to launch it. Yes! That is the unvarnished truth.[1] And he and his handlers continue to wage it, to lie about it, to constantly, deceitfully and shamefully promote it with bogus, fabricated, misquoted revisions of history, to cynically mischaracterize a conflict he and his cohorts refused to serve in and now, well now. Now this Ari Fleischer and company slick, so they think, advertising campaign to resell this fraud. The Bushies manipulated intelligence, shaped it around policy, lied about their reasons for invading Iraq, handed over billions of dollars to corrupt contractors with intimate connections to members of the administration, used the conflict to launch an unending, nebulous “war” with which to instill terror in the hearts of ordinary Americans, the better to steal their constitutional freedoms and now, over the dead bodies and missing limbs of military personnel and the grief of their families they attempt to advertize their way out of their colossal crimes. Again using images of the twin towers to evoke the lie, the cynical, constantly repeated big lie of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorists of 911.
Any comparison George Bush attempts to draw between the exit from Vietnam, the forces present in Vietnam and the necessity and efficacy of an exit from Iraq and the forces present in the civil war and anti-American insurgency in Iraq are simply self-serving, ignorant, stupid and laughably absurd. The only valid comparison between Iraq and Vietnam is that they are both quagmires caused by miscalculations and short-sighted decisions, justified to the American people with lies and misrepresentations. And if George Bush learned anything about the history of World War II in college, he never retained any of it past his “gentleman’s ‘Cs’” on his final exams. “His war” is an ignoble lie, not a struggle against the enslavement of humankind, as was the heroic effort of “The Greatest Generation” in the nineteen forties.
Franklin Roosevelt was a big man with big thoughts. He never instituted color-coded fear systems to scare the bejesus out of us or ominously warned us of impending doom from mysterious hidden forces. In his booming voice he told us we had nothing to fear. For all his faults, he was competent, intelligent and in charge. FDR united a nation and he led.
Bush is a small man with small thoughts, controlled by powerful and greedy forces, doing great damage to a great democracy in the service of a base and shallow agenda for crass political purpose. He and his handlers are our clear and present danger, not the war on “terrer” of his diseased and dangerous brain. This popinjay is no more capable of protecting us from threats than his dog Barney, but in his ignorance and ineptness and in his arrogantly stubborn refusal to admit he screwed up royally…AGAIN, he is the preeminent threat of our era.
It is 2007, not 1942 or 1968 and 911 was a terrorist act by individuals not connected to Saddam Hussein. We instigated an invasion, we did not respond to an invasion. We have not risen heroically to a threat, we have been cowed into giving up our liberties in return for protection from a nebulous threat created and defined by an incompetent ne’er-do-well.
[1] See Downing Street Memo. See testimony of Richard Clark, Paul O’Neil. See Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson v Bush Administration Google Project for the New American Century. File FOIA requests for the contents of Dick Cheney’s man-sized safe.
[2] Dower, John, Embracing Defeat:Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999
