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 Ice
Cube 
 "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he
wants is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous
in fact, but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure
in the grand eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle.
Pyongyang isn't even in the Bible!" "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to
our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with
explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be
upon him. "
 "'When
it comes to learning from its mistakes, corporate America has
fallen off the rehab wagon more times than Robert Downey, Jr.
A quick glance at last week's papers reveals that it's monkey
business as usual on Wall Street."
 "'People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in, and
now they have to realize that they can actually create that
world and fight for the things that are worth fighting for
and not feel apathetic. We are all going to die. There is
no point in holding anything back."
 "The
idea -- if we may use so flattering a term -- was that the
Pentagon would monitor the site and the betting, and thus
get a jump on terrorist acts to come. After all, as the theory
goes (and never mind the whole dot.com fiasco), if people
are willing to put money on something, they must have a pretty
good idea what they're doing."
 "Voters
are sick and tired of having their electoral choices severely
limited by a ruling class that has done everything in its
power to maintain the status quo -- including the latest round
of under-the-radar redistricting deals that make it all but
impossible to unseat incumbents."
 "There's
some thing in our psyche, this kind of right or privilege
to resolve our conflicts with violence. There's an arrogance
to that concept. To actually have to sit down and talk, to
listen, to compromise, that's hard work. To go for the gun,
that's the cowardly act."
 "The
music business is run by lawyers and accountants, and they
don't really care about the integrity of art." |
by Ross Levine President Bush delivered a speech the other night, the rehearsed kind he's not quite so bad at. He stared down the camera barrel and used his beady eyes best he could to put a scare into the hearts of whatever terrorists -- or Gore voters -- might've been watching. I couldn't help but think of three other speeches he's given in the not so distant past. The first was six months ago, the "Saddam, you got 48 hours to get out of Baghdad" oration. I suppose he had the same look in his eyes during that one, only with a tad more arrogance. With most of our allies unwilling to leave the U.N. wagon train, there he was, headed down Main Street with the American military poised at the ready. About a month or so later, he delivered his "Aircraft Carrier Address," with the twinkling eyes of a boxer who had just knocked out the reigning champ. The third speech consisted of but three words -- "Bring 'em on!" -- and seemed to sum up our fears that the President, if not properly supervised, might single-handedly lead us into Dubya Dubya III. But the speech he gave the other night was worth a million bucks. More, in fact. Eighty-six billion, nine-hundred and ninety-nine million more. If only those were his poll numbers, he'd be president for life. Bush began his speech with a rundown of the war on terror thus far, making it sound like victory was just around the bend. He chose his words -- and tenses -- carefully, saying with confidence that Iraq "possessed and used weapons of mass destruction," perhaps indicating that even he no longer believes it still has them. He called our military campaign in Iraq one of the "swiftest" and "most humane" in human history, which was quite reassuring, to know that war is no longer a scourge but something that can be perfected if we keep working at it. His words suggest all sorts of possibilities for healing mankind's ills -- if we can make war humane, imagine what can be done for genocide and environmental destruction. From here the fictitious President boasted that we were putting to rest the lie that free nations are decadent and weak, that after extinguishing the fires of September 11 (or having our rescue workers do it, without letting on that it might kill them, too), and mourning our dead, we went to war to "[roll] back the terrorist threat" and help the "long-suffering people of Iraq" go from a nation of "mass graves" to one of "laws and free institutions." Now that it's obvious Iraq was not an imminent threat to the free world, the justification for our crusade has been cleverly transformed. If we Westernize Iraq, the whole Middle East will become an "exporter of peace, not terror." The great Bush has thus reworked the domino theory -- instead of communism knocking down one U.S.-supported right-wing government after another, democracy will now knock down one U.S.-supported authoritarian Muslim state after another (think Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia). The problem is, if systems of government are contagious, why hasn't South America caught ours, and the Arab states contracted Israel's?
Details, details. The President subsequently went on to sum up the current state of affairs on the Iraqi front, explaining that members of the "old Saddam regime who fled the battlefield" and "foreign terrorists," who may or may not be working together, are the "killers" who "want us to leave Iraq before our work is done" so they can "prove we will run" away when the going gets tough. First of all, poor Bush must have "terrorists" on the brain, since he deploys the word to describe everybody these days, and second, there must be something in the water in Texas, because Bush is sounding an awful lot like LBJ of late, telling us that unless we ramp up the war effort, America is done for. Although it may be too soon to know whether "these killers" in Iraq will prove to have the tenaciousness of the Viet Cong, it's not too soon to realize that Bush and his three-headed dog Chumsowitz (as in Dick, Donald and Paul) are not the types to stop digging when they find themselves in a hole. What followed was one of the highlights and -- to my ears -- surprises in the speech, that Iraq has now become the "central front" in our war against terror. Considering that no terrorist weapons have been found there, and no link between Saddam and Al Qaeda has yet been proven, one wonders if the President isn't acknowledging what many of his more strident critics have insisted, that our invasion of Iraq has itself transformed the country into a terrorist front. But I think not. I think Bush wants to convince us that his -- alas, our -- war on terror is progressing according to plan, and that Iraq is part of that plan, with no further explanation needed. In his speech, he compared Iraq to Germany and Japan, positing that the reconstruction of those nations after WWII has been a great boon to the free world, and that a rebuilt, democratic Iraq will have the same result. But September 11 was not quite Pearl Harbor -- no particular nation attacked us -- so by this justification, the United States basically has free reign to reduce any country to a state of post-war chaos with the idea that, once rebuilt, the world will be better off. But if we reserve the right to take out any foreign government whether it attacks us or not, well, to my mind, that "becomes the unlawful use of force or violence against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments for ideological or political reasons," which, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is the definition of terrorism. But Bush, far from finished with his fifteen minutes, proceeded to lay a guilt trip on the U.N., saying that its member nations had the "opportunity and the responsibility" to put their boys and girls under our control in our war with Iraq. We've "killed hundreds of terrorists" and discarded "45 out of 57" playing cards to either prison or the grave, now the least the world can do is ante up. Never mind our past differences -- other nations have a "duty" to help out. Do I have to say it? Clinton made a mistake that didn't fill a single body bag and got impeached for it; Bush made a boo-boo that's costing us lives and money (he'll get to that soon, don't worry) and he's still got Congress eating out of his palm. And that's because, like Achilles, who was dunked in the River Styx, Bush was dipped in the ashes of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and has been practically invulnerable ever since. But I'd say his heel was showing prominently when he mentioned the $87 billion.
Can we conceive of $87 billion? It's not much compared to the national debt, which is now estimated at $6 trillion. And true, we do spend more money than $87 bill on education and Medicare. But it's still a hunky chunk o' change, and we know that if that's the number he's putting out there, it's a stripped down model, with the real cost even more. We also know that there's no guarantees here, that even if we turn Iraq into Shangri-la and Baghdad into the Emerald City, a lightning bolt will not necessarily hit Osama bin Laden, the Saudis may still channel the contents of their petro-pockets to the evildoers, the Israelis and Palestinians may still refuse to French kiss at the MTV Awards, and African, Indonesia, Chechnya, etc., may remain the intermittently bloody messes that they are. Even if, in the name of unselfishness, we close our eyes to the needs of our own citizens and infrastructure, and spend what undoubtedly will, by next year, come to over a hundred billion dollars to remake Iraq, it's still going to be like entering a rotten neighborhood, investing a fortune in rebuilding a dilapidated house, and then waiting for the rest of the area to catch up. It may just happen, but then again, one may also end up taking a humongous loss. Of course, not all the bills in those billions are going to Bechtel and Halliburton. Bush reminded us the other night that the money is needed to support our troops. Like in many dysfunctional families, Papa squanders the family nest egg on his harebrained schemes, and it's the kids who end up paying the price. I'm not so naïve to think that our troops don't need tanks or guns, but I also know that it's easier to send them off to war than bring them home. And golly, we told Papa that, but he just wouldn't listen. So now, Bush told us, we'll have Secretary Powell gallivanting about the globe holding "funding conferences" -- a polite way to say "begging for money" -- with world leaders. He reminded us that there's no going back to the pre-9/11 era, which is a thinly veiled dig at his predecessor for not miring us in a guerilla war after the bombings of the embassies in Africa (never mind that the President's own father opted for prudence in the face of an occupation of Iraq). Perhaps if a previous president had had the courage to begin the war on terrorism earlier, 9/11 never would have happened because the terrorists would have been more afraid of us. By this logic, it almost doesn't matter whether you make the central front Iraq or Upper Volta -- the United States must simply be at war somewhere, lest the evildoers think we don't have the guts to fight. Peace is for sissies. And unless we fight the enemy "there," we'll have to fight him "here." Unless Oceania remains in perpetual conflict, we'll be deemed an easy target. But on the other hand, maybe our enemies are laughing in their caves, watching us inflict more damage to ourselves -- measured in the deaths of our soldiers and their extended tours of duty, in the harm to our economy and society -- than they could have wrought with all their plots and bombs. It's like watching an elephant thrash about at a mouse, bloodying itself on the confines of its enclosure.
Bush concluded his speech with the proverbial letter from the battlefield, a captain stationed in Iraq who sees a "just cause" in the "eyes of a hungry people" as he writes "from the front lines of freedom." Once again the President is troweling on the Rumsfeldian fantasy of Iraqi masses looking to the U.S. for liberation. Maybe they are -- I'm sure the majority of Iraqis wouldn't mind a little more modernity in their lives and government. The problem is the Iraqis are not a single mass, but a people as divided as we are. Some hate us, some love us. Some Americans think Bush is the messiah, installed in the White House to save us from the barbarians, while others think he's the worst leader in America since, well, his namesake King George III. Come to think of it, a revolution might be in order. But I'm afraid the messiah viewpoint prevails. After the speech, Bush was given credit for admitting that his flouting of world opinion was a mistake, and for being man enough to admit it and ask for help. If that's all the political accountability we demand of our presidents, well, maybe even Saddam deserves a second term 10 September 03 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is.
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