Who, us imperialists? A U.S. Marine covers the head of a statue of Saddam Hussein with a U.S. flag in Baghdad shortly before Marines toppled the statue. The whole Muslim world was watching and probably wondering when they would be next.
A hollow 'victory'
If an eighth-grader beat up a second-grader, we wouldn't call the eighth-grader a hero.
Yet that's the moral and spiritual equivalent of the United States' "victory" over Iraq.
Let's face it: The Bush regime chose to attack Iraq only because it knew it would be a sure kill. If it had had any doubt as to the outcome, it would not have worried itself about "liberating" the Iraqis, who never asked to be liberated. If the Bush regime truly believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, it would not have sent tens of thousands of U.S. troops into Iraq to be slaughtered by those WMDs. Such a scenario would have meant the sure political death of the Bush regime.
The Bush regime does have doubts, however, as to the outcome of a military tangle with North Korea -- which, unlike Iraq, not only possesses nuclear weapons but has threatened to use them against the United States -- which is why the Bush regime is practically ignoring the North Korean crisis.
The unprovoked, illegal and immoral -- and, let me add, imperialist -- U.S. takeover of Iraq is about many things. Yes, of course, it's about the oil. And the money. And the stupid rich white men in the Bush regime -- most of whom have never been in combat -- who somehow feel macho by having young men, a disproportionate number of them Latino and black, fight their wars for greed for them. And it's about the wacko fundamentalist "Christians," including our "president," who think that God wants them to wipe the Muslims from the face of the planet.
But it's also about, and it's primarily about, mass distraction.
In times of crisis, a nation feels better about itself by knocking the shit out of another nation. After World War I economically devastated Germany, Adolf Hitler was able to use war to keep himself in power. He created a bogeyman -- the Jew -- and united the German people in hatred and in murder.
In George Orwell's 1984, the three totalitarian governments of the world perpetually conduct fake wars with each other in order to keep the oppressed masses distracted from their real problems, which are caused by the ruling elite. In Orwell's bleak futuristic world, the ruling elite live opulently while the masses live in squalor, and the elite are able to get away with it because they convince the masses -- through ceaseless propaganda -- that they are vigilantly protecting the masses from the ever-present dangers posed to them by the enemy. (Although the totalitarian regime in 1984 does not use a color-coded alert system, the regime has the total monitoring of the masses that would make John Ashcroft ejaculate.)
The identical dynamics are now here in the United States.
The Bush regime has its own bogeyman, the Muslim. And now with buzz about the United States illegally, immorally, unprovokedly and imperialistically attacking next Syria and then Iran (and then...), it looks as though the Bush regime's "solution" to the United States' mounting serious economic and domestic problems is to keep the "war on terrorism" raging right through the 2004 election. After all, the bleating masses will be too terrified to have a change of guard when we're in the middle of a war, won't they?
I am shocked and awed that the majority of Americans can't -- or won't -- see all of this.
What short memories we have here in the United States of Amnesia (as Gore Vidal so aptly calls us). Al Gore received at least a half-million more votes than did George W. Bush, whom the five members of the U.S. Supreme Court whom were appointed by Republican presidents installed in the White House. This was only two years ago, yet the majority of Americans consider "President" Bush to be our legitimate president.
Iraq never possessed weapons of mass destruction that could harm the United States. The Bush regime was bound and determined to attack Iraq no matter what, however, and so it bypassed the United Nations when it was clear that it could not bribe and/or arm-twist enough nations on the U.N. Security Council to rubber-stamp a U.S. attack on Iraq.
This occurred only recently, but like the 2000 election, this, too, is ancient history in the mind of the typical amnesiac American.
Here's some more ancient history: Last month the United States, now a rogue nation, began its assault on a much smaller, much weaker nation that posed no threat to the United States and did not threaten to harm the United States.
So I ask you: What the fuck is there to celebrate?
8:07:28 PM 
|
