The President's invented crisis originally nutty, rises to fruitcake proportions. Throughout the world, terrorist and non-terrorist Muslim extremists pray the US invade Iraq. It may be the only thing they and Secretary Rumsfeld share in their prayers. This looming war on a country in deep freeze for a dozen years holds the possibility of damning America's earthly purpose of peaceful betterment. The President's illusion of righteousness erected on untruth makes meaningless the purposefulness of his country's goodness and greatness.
Unless Saddam Hussein soon lays his head on the president's chopping block, the war G.W. Bush seemingly ordains as his birthright will come to pass. From the pinnacle of near Pharaonic power, the leader of the greatest country in history insists on being brought the head of an insignificant tyrant. Iraq II won't be a war. It will be a disgrace. Our president has us acting toward adversity not as heirs to our founders' enlightenment but as Barbarians of old Europe.
Unless the prostrate Congress quickly get off their knees and speak truth to power, the promise of the American Century will not survive the nauseating fiction that a second Iraq war is a necessity to keep the world safe for democracy.
It's small consolation how lightening fast Iraq falls to our military might. The dirty mission our proud military would be ordered to launch is founded on fraud. Saddam Hussein is not and never will be a threat to the US or US allies; there is no Saddam-al Qaeda connection. The spectacle of a war of aggression crafted by a cult of impudence within the White House will become a plague upon our nation. The President's victorious war partisans will dance like apes on a base drum, but the world will remain disgusted. The battle may be brief, but should the political illusion that the Cabinet expects to play out in the Middle East fail to go according to dictate, who wins the war?
This Administration and Congress have damaged American destiny. The President missteps but he can still stake the high ground and claim Saddam Hussein is capitulating to America's ring of armor. No small victory. The supine Congress will applaud aptly and state Iraq is containable without war. But stumbling into Iraq is not worth a single drop of American blood or ounce of American honor.
Should the war Cabinet fret they've marched the troops up the hill all dressed up with no place to go, let them turn sincere urgency on North Korea's cage rattling and intelligently settle a potential catastrophe they can rightfully claim frightful, very frightful. That's where the exceptional courage of a good and brave man, George W. Bush can be placed at the service of the world. I pray a storm of luck comes his way to end wasting courage on a shimmering mirage.
February 23, 2003