Mission Accomplished

On May 1, 2003, George Bush landed aboard an aircraft carrier and declared the end of conflict in Iraq, behind a massive banner declared, "Mission Accomplish." Five years later, the occupation of Iraq continues and George Bush has provided a series of explanations to clarify what he meant when he said that the major conflict in Iraq was over, in the latest, he again blames the banner and said it should have been "more specific." They keep going back to the banner, as if that's the problem and not the fact that US men and women die daily as  the ill-conceived occupation enters its fifth year--and we've been in Afghanistan since 2001.  Meanwhile, the United States commits billions of dollars sustaining the occupation and the country slides into something that looks like an Economic Depression as oil companies continue to post record breaking profits. And I don't see any way out or any politician with the will to end the debacle anytime soon. We were tricked into the occupation because the people of the United States are clearly  the stupidest most gullible people on the planet, and because our news media failed it its primary duty to inform the public forgetting that a free press is the watchdog of democracy.  And in this corner we have a President and Supreme Court who seem intent upon dismantling our Constitution (in John Scalia's opinion, the Constitution is dead, and he ought to know because he stabbed it--and us--in  the back). So, if Bush's plan was to disassemble the United States and reform it so that it better serves oil companies and pharmaceutical giants and his buddies at Bechtel, that the mission is truly accomplished. These are the things I will be thinking about on this May Day, as the media spins its wheels about Rev. Wright and an in-depth analysis of Vanity Fair's photos of Miley Cyrus, while reporting that this economic downturn is anything but a recession and people continue to die in Iraq as the US occupation enters its fifth year.

Crocodile tears

George W. Bush wept yesterday at White House ceremonies honoring 22-year-old Marine Jason Dunham who died two years ago in Iraq. I'm not sure I'd call that single tear that dribbled down his mottled left cheek weeping, but Georgie's eyes watered. Could have been emotion. Could have been hay fever.  No word on whether he has wept buckets over the other 3,999 US servicemen who have been killed in Iraq, or the thousands who have been permanently injured, or the hundreds of  thousands of Iraqi's who are living in a war zone. We have been in Iraq for five years, and no one's life is better and no one is safer, and the economy is in the tank, crushed under the weight of an ever escalating, never ending war debt. It's about George Bush shed a tear for something. The invasion was a failure, the occupation is a failure, the surge is a failure, and the government wants to continue. I have no idea where these soldiers are coming from, short of a draft. Bush continues to characterize this debacle as central to the "war on terror," which would be laughable if it were not so tragic. All Bush has managed to do is to turn more people against the United States, make it citizens the focus of Islamic distrust, and make the whole world generally more dangerous for the rest of us. So, why can't we just cut our losses and walk away?

And I also have a bridge in Brooklyn you might want to buy

Karl Rove told Charlie Rose (Nov 21) that George W. Bush was pushed into Iraq by the Congress. I will wait a moment as you read that a second time. Maybe a third. I don't believe he said it either. But he did and he said it on TV. And here all along I thought I heard Bush ask Congress to authorize the use of the US military in Iraq--what could I have been smoking.

I've been thinking about this interview for a few days now and trying to assemble my thoughts without using expletives that need deleting. Both of them make me so angry.

Had he not been pushed into invading Iraq, Rove maintains, Bush would have done what he really wanted to do in the first place: Provide more time for inspectors. What Bush wanted was a peaceful alternative but was thwarted by Congress. When I heard that I looked out the window to make sure there were no pigs roosting in my trees. I assume that Congress also forced the preemptive strike on the peace loving president. However, it should be noted that in this interview Rove admitted that the United States rushed into war ill-prepared.

This is historic revision on a monumental scale. In fact, it more closely resembles convenient fiction and it makes clear why his dear friend George Bush calls Karl Rove "turd blossom." Rove and Bush are the kind of people who allow other people to go to war for them, they did it in Vietnam and they are doing it now. They do pretty much what they want with human lives and never let it be said that either is concerned about trampling on the Constitution in the bargain.

Karl Rove, and by extension George Bush, succeed because they think Americans are stupid--and they are right. Their sole purpose, as far as I can see it, is to put everything in this country into the hands of a few wealthy friends. They call this privatization. I used to think the whole Iraqi mess was for oil, but I slowly came to realize that these guys mean business. Today, Iraq, tomorrow the whole world. Right now, it's blood for oil, as long as the blood is not Rove's or Bush's. Rove is a traitor to his country, he gave up a CIA agent for political reasons. But I don't see anyone rushing to put the guy behind bars where he belongs.

But this is what comes of Republicans, who have rewritten history to the point that we forget that it was Ronald Reagan who armed and funded all of the "terrorists" we are now fighting. Before this is done, the Republicans will have rewritten history making George W. Bush the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln. When you tell a lie, make it a big one, Adolph Hitler said, knowing that the bigger the lie, the easier it is for people to believe.

When the interview ended I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or slit my wrist. But one word reverberated in my fevered brain: Contemptible. The whole lot is contemptible, as are the people who voted for them, the people who continue to support them, and the weak livered Congress that allowed this to happen.

But we are not into nation building

Instead of going after the architects of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, George Bush, for his own reasons, diverted the military to the occupation of Iraq, for reasons that are still not clear. And even now, when the administration's lies about our motives and their complicity, are common knowledge, Bush and his various mouthpieces insist on equating the two.

Here's what I know: In the five years since our invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi people are not safe in their own homes, do not have reliable electricity or running water, and live lives of unimagined terror. The only people who seem to be doing well in Iraq are the independent contractors who question prisoners, cater Army meals, and manage every aspect of Iraqi life from the spotty electricity to the stock exchange. Tonight the President will appear on television to assure us that things are just dandy in Iraq and that troops will be coming home soon, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

No doubt about it, the attacks on 9/11 should have been answered, but the Taleban could have been found in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, had we been interested in looking. We sure didn't care what the Taleban was doing when it usurped the Afghan government an instituted faith based policies that meant females could not be educated or hold jobs and that it was just fine to blow up those Buddhas.

I understand that we Americans do not like to think of ourselves as the aggressive bully boys who would invade a country that has done nothing to us--but that is exactly what happened. And it is not unpatriotic to question this or any other administration.

If we are not, as the administration maintains, dabbling in nation building, then why are we in Iraq? If the administration did not intend our presence to be permanent that why did he completely destroy Iraq's ability to govern itself? This week Abdul-Satter Abu Risha, the most prominent figure in a revolt of Sunni sheiks against al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed in an explosion near his home in Anbar province. Does it seem to you that Iraq is making slow but stead progress towards becoming a democratic nation?

Bush can send all the soldiers and marines he wants to Iraq and it will make little difference. It's like calling the cops when your neighbor beats his wife. He'll stop beating his wife while the cops are then--but resumes when the cops are gone. We, the United States of America, has created one hell of a mess in Iraq. Since the first Bush administration, we have taken a country that had a high literacy rate, free health care, and equal opportunities for woman and reduced it to the stone age. We have brought those people nothing but heartbreak and despair. The senate Democrats lack the will to end the war by doing what Nixon did in Vietnam--he declared it over and brought troops home. And I can hear you now, "But look and what happened in Vietnam after we left." What happened in Vietnam happened because we were there in the first place. What has happened and what will happen in Iraq happens because we are there. Armies of occupation are never welcomed and we are an army of occupation who came unbidden into a country that had done us no harm. There are Iraqi people who remember Iraqi before the sanctions, before the occupation. Maybe the only answer at this juncture is to allow Iraq to splinter into it's original shape, pre-British intervention, before Gertrude Bell stitched it together and called it a country.