Fall From Grace

The fix is in at The White House to invade Iraq. The flea circus regime that can't bomb their way out of a pita pocket, we're told must be destroyed for their own good - and so the rest of us may sleep tight. Those of us who think it only polite for the Bush administration to provide America a credible reason for this foray by a quarter million US troops are thrown a slippery diet of fishy motives hawking the invasion.

As it happens, Saddam Hussein is a toothless threat to our country and allies. There is still no evidence he possesses weapons of mass destruction. Try as we may, we can find no Al Qaeda connection. Selective attention to human rights violations is a calculated pretext for invasion that increases the credibility gap. Saddam as Hitler? The real mad genius turns over in his grave each time he's compared with a tin pot survivalist. For good measure, we're tossed the notion that it's our job to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, although popular elections there will likely bring Muslim fundamentalists into power and the Pentagon prefers a regime change of the friendly Pakistani military dictator type.

For this populist menu, our country's human, material, and political capital is to be sacrificed. For this we'll squander the noble seat in that shinning city upon a hill recent generations labored through the better angels of their nature to elevate us upon.

We embark on a mad adventure launching an unnecessary war against Iraq. Here's a ruinous enterprise against our unique place as the nation evolved to bring a covenant of human ideals to an earth hungering for liberation, not through acts of war, but through the acts of unlimited imagination, genius and fellowship that brought America to eminence.

Shall all the reasons for invasion, gaping of evidence and logic, be enough to exonerate our discombobulated fear of a fruity dictator who can be contained? It won't be enough to tell innocent Iraqis that we must kill you because we love you or that in order to save your village we must burn it. If  Iraqis see US Marines as occupiers, won't they bite, not for Saddam, but for hearth and tribe?

It's bad enough the President is ready to bring on this war and alienates the world (while at home the Constitution is bled of guaranteed protections). The maelstrom's consequences will confound America's view of herself as just and good just as it did in Southeast Asia.

Iraq is a flea to our Doberman. I'm confident this senseless war can be avoided once the 30-power microscope that makes a flea look like a monster and that Iraq is shown to us through is turned down. I have no doubt that then the same Americans who now back our president's war itch will back him just as readily when he decides to chain the dogs of war and unleash creative solutions on a pesky problem. 

December 18, 2002