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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. "
 "'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."
 "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."
 "You
need gas money and a car that works. Of course, my preference
is to do it in the middle of the night! Leave them little
presents, you know what I'm saying? Like the Easter bunny."
 "Peck's
soul, like his formid-able legacy, was one of peace, so it is poetic that he left this world in such a manner. But the times he has left behind for his unknown sons and daughters resembles the dystopia of Boys From Brazil more each day."  "The
recall provision itself was designed as a way for the
people of the state to get rid of a governor who had
disappointed them. Not a bad idea on the face of it,.
but then about 90 years later, reality sets in." "There's
a scene in Richard Link-later's Waking Life where
the protagonist crouches down to read a note in the
street that says, 'Look to your right,' which he does,
only to come face to face with a speeding car aiming
right for his head. That's what it's like to listen
to Mars Volta's De-loused in the Comatorium for
the first time. " |
by Ross Levine Who knew that when Bill Clinton had sex -- without intern-course, of course -- with "that woman," it would eventually cost us more than 87 billion dollars? And a lot of lives, too. Indeed, Bill's tobacco-stained dalliance seemed a straw that the static Gore could not shake from his back, giving Bush the moral advantage among, if not exactly the voters, at least the Supreme Court. And thus was set in motion a chain of events that now has us waking every morning with a futile gasp -- oh no, another one? Two more? Six? Fifteen? Dead soldiers. I remember following the "major combat" phase of the war, distressed over the casualties but relieved (since I knew none of the dead) that there weren't "too many," whatever that meant. But since the war "ended" (pardon all the quotation marks, but the battle against terrorism has been expanded to one of words as well), we've been witnessing a mounting death and injury rate among our young men and women that brings to mind the darkest days in Southeast Asia. Well, not the darkest. I recently heard a supporter of the Iraq war compare our present casualties to those we suffered during the Tet Offensive -- hundreds of American soldiers killed in a matter of days. So I suppose it all becomes a numbers game -- as long as we're below Vietnam's magic number of 50,000, we're doing OK. Speaking of Tet, President Johnson called it a complete failure on the enemy's part, but now we know he was spinning so hard he eventually gyrated out of office. It took a new president, Nixon, to get us out of the jungle, but not before there were plenty of additional names to chisel onto Maya Lin's overcrowded wall.
Bush, too, has come up with some good ones of late, especially his idea that, if I may paraphrase, the worse it gets over there, the more successful we are. At his most recent press conference in late October -- his first since July -- he tried to disavow the now notorious "Mission Accomplished" banner, but was immediately called to task. And more recently, he had this to add: "The enemy in Iraq believes America will run. That's why they're willing to kill innocent civilians, relief workers, coalition troops. America will never run." From this statement, it's apparent that Bush still believes the war is over. He has the idea that our troops are no longer over there fighting, but simply doing PR for America the Strong while democracy blooms wherever their boots hit the sand. Dear President Bush, please get a grip. I watched your press conference, and understand that you are now a leader without the flexibility to lead. In government, pragmatism is essential, idealism deadly. In the world according to Bush, American troops must remain in Iraq until another president gets them out -- it's as simple as that. There may be no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam may have indeed been willing to negotiate before we attacked, and a few more months and we might have had a true coalition on our side -- but it's too late now. Bush, like Johnson, has backed himself into a corner -- every time a soldier dies, some of us may think it's one more needless death, but Bush and his toadies think the death is only needless if we don't stick this out. Just think of Iraq as a desperately sick animal -- do you keep spending money at the vet or do you just let nature take its course? Then again, the animal is presently suffering an infection we gave it. Bush, however, believes that we can turn Iraq into a democracy, reform the Middle East and thus dry up the yolk feeding terrorism throughout the world. Some of us are more skeptical. What we've done in Iraq, basically, is unleash a civil war. We overthrew the dictator and now have to deal with the consequences -- a heterogeneous society without a common goal. When Washington and his rebels defeated King George, they called the new country the United States, which turned out to be little more than wishful thinking. A hundred years of history were spent leading up to, fighting and recovering from the Civil War (some people might argue it's 200 years and counting). Democracies -- any system of government -- do not come about by spontaneous generation, like life from decaying matter. We may be laying our eggs over there, but they're not going to hatch and mature overnight -- if at all. In other words, it sounded good on presidential speech paper but . . . only an idealogue like Bush could believe that American values are so powerful, they can be transferred anywhere in the world by the sheer force of our self-righteousness.
He says now, sticking it to some of our Arab "allies," that we've been "accommodating" rotten governments in the Middle East too long, and that when democracies emerge over there -- presumably, after Iraq shows them the way -- these democracies "will not and should not look like us." So what will they look like? Is he lowering our expectations? Certainly fundamentalist Islamic states won't be acceptable to us. Nor -- let's hope -- autocratic Shah-like right-wing oligarchies. Maybe he just means they don't necessarily have to insert "under Allah" in their Pledge of Allegiances or allow certain liberties that we, for the moment, still have here, such as freedom of speech and press, and gay and abortion rights. Our objectives in Iraq -- and indeed, in the Middle East in general -- are so vague that saying goodbye may be awfully hard to do: if your mission isn't specific enough, it's hard to know when you've accomplished it. There was no Kuwait factor in this Gulf war; Saddam was only -- for better or worse -- occupying his own country, a fact that obviously conflicted with the Bush master plan. We hope that Bush and his staff put more thought into that particular plan than into their Road Map for Peace a few doors down, but with each passing day, it seems painfully obvious they haven't. To glean a larger lesson from it all, war is a dangerous tactic, not to be used offensively unless you're a shameless empire seeking to enlarge your fortunes. Never mind Chamberlain and Czechoslovakia -- the French and British could have said no to Adolf, sent troops to the Sudetenland, and waited for the Germans to attack them. That's because war, contrary to Berkeley and Santa Monica bumper stickers, is always the answer, never the question. Unless an enemy asks for war by provoking it, you open up more human evils by starting one than even Pandora could stuff in her box. Because Bush began this war (unless he can prove a credible link between Saddam and September 11), there are investigations demanded everywhere, battles over appropriations, family members questioning their children's sacrifice, an entire world loath to support us, and a serious disconnect between how our leaders see themselves and how the people they're supposedly working to liberate see them. No matter how lofty the idealism that begins a war, it's misery and destruction that end it. No matter what you're fighting for, blood splatters every hand. Volleys of platitudes may, to some extent, win the battle at home, but on the battlefield, they have no effect at all. Unfortunately, because of the nature of life in the military, it's the ones on the battlefield who are last to complain. As a lieutenant colonel from Fort Hood, Indiana, explained in the New York Times: "We can't afford to get into the emotional aspects. We all have our opinions, but we're soldiers first. You got to get out of the day-to-day body count." General Ricardo Sanchez, our top commander in Iraq, went so far as to call the casualties "strategically and operationally insignificant." Well, what do you expect from a general? The enlisted men, unless they've completely lost it after witnessing a comrade torn in half, always put a good face on things -- we're soldiers first, humans later -- we're just doing our job -- if you see a rocket grenade headed your way, duck. The ones that make it back can save their real feelings for some documentary 20 years down the road. I think it's fair to say that nobody should expect much relief from all this any time soon. Strangely enough, Bush says he's reducing the number of troops to 100,000 next year, despite the fact that most military experts have said that, if we are going to stick it out, we need more people there, not less. And we are sticking it out: "The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region." That's Bush again, raising the stakes ever higher.
Hubris kills. And Bush has become hubris incarnate. So with the Terminator's hands full in California, who can save us? Forget about Congress. They wimped out on the $87 billion, too cowardly to even vote, handing Bush every dollar he asked for, despite concerns about the deficit and enriching Halliburton. Republicans don't like to be seen as big spenders, and Democrats are petrified to be seen as not supporting our troops. As for ourselves, we have to wait until next November, and even that's not a given. As long as Bush can keep convincing Americans that we're winning the war against terrorism, we may stay with the devil we know rather than risk getting to know another. So who can say? It may be 2008 before Iraq is democratic enough for our approval; before we finally get a concrete answer on how many dead soldiers are enough to be strategically and operationally significant; before we finally stop letting inflexible assumptions hold life and death sway over our nation. In the meantime, we must work out the present leadership's dichotomy for ourselves -- how life can be so sacred in a womb, and so expendable in a uniform. 10 November 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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