Now that Bush has been battered off his fling with unilateral action in Iraq, maybe the rest of humanity can help that country repair the damage done to it by Saddam and the ill-timed war against him. Maybe.

BUSH'S WILD-GOOSE CHASE INTO IRAQ

Saddam Hussein was finally defanged around the outset of this century. Bush's saber-rattling was lending new teeth to UN inspections bottling up the old buzzard. In this context the Congressional authorization to saddle up for more military threat made sense; as conditioned on attracting international cooperation.

Why, then, did we suddenly divert national resources from the pressing priority ---to face fundamentalist terror--for unilateral attack on hapless Iraq? Evidently the believer Bush was susceptible to his advisers' neo-"conservative" theories.

That answer affords the benefit of whatever remaining doubt about widespread allegations that something more nefarious was afloat. (Further investigation could conceivably support prosecutions for conspiracy to commit the international crime of waging aggressive war.)

In any event the cohorts were at best thinking too much. Where was our old common sense? "Republican" ideology--hopefully no more "conspiratorial" than utopian dreams about morphing the whole Middle East into our Jeffersonian image--held sway over the venerable skepticism of pragmatic America.

The Bush Debacle testifies about the folly of naïve attempts to disrupt the continuity of history with harebrained schemes. Reality is too complicated for such "jacobin" interference with the natural flow of things: leading to unanticipated consequences like the mess in Iraq.

Founders like Washington and Jefferson must be turning in their graves. Whatever got into those Bush-leaguers now attracting international scorn? It was again at best some preconceived belief system; under the likes of which the French Revolution degenerated into a Reign of Terror.

Will we never learn? Consider their rhetorical "half-truths;" like the puffery of reasons why it was a good deed to sort Saddam out. They thereby dance around an obvious elephant-in-the-room: the wild-goose chase into Iraq has facilitated the very globalization of terror.

Wake up, America! Bush and his boys must be bonkers at best. Despite naturally Republican leanings, therefore, I must resume sadly a secondary choice (spanning voter maturity) to support Democrats in the coming election: this time upon a desperately patriotic quest to help protect everyone from the worst batch of pretenders yet to the mantle of genuine conservatism.

Senator John McCain could help by reconsidering his (otherwise commendable) forgiveness of all the dirty tricks they played on him in South Carolina. Those tricks foreshadowed the fraud sprung on everyone by this patently incompetent and probably corrupt administration.

The Bush Gang lacks the moral and intellectual subtlety needed to wage the current kind of war. It is inescapably ideological: fundamentalists versus fundamentalists. We have neglected the real enemy (within and without). Smarter Americans are needed to make more friends.

The key, of course, is to become honest brokers of peace in Israel and Palestine. This would entail settling out the hash of our own fundamentalists; as well as those currently crazed against civilization itself. Appeal is needed for human compassion to settle down indeed our instinctive urges toward animal barbarism. Grow up, world!

© Jim McCord
July 13, 2004

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