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Wednesday 
17 August 2005
The dying dream of America
America has lost the Iraq war.
Sure, maybe you thought you heard something about victory, but victory means you get in, do your job, and you get out. It doesn’t mean you hang around for what’s going onto two years as more soldiers die daily at the hand of insurgents.
Iraq’s a spot on America’s battle record. Just like Vietnam. The insurgents missed the memo where wars are fought squarely and fairly. Come to think of it, so did I.
What’s the remedy? Who knows. Clearly, staying behind to fend off the “insurgents” isn’t panning out. Everyone knows America cried wolf with Iraq, when they said that Saddam was too chummy with the bad guys, that Bush and the Boys used falsified info to launch an unjustified invasion, thus bringing their “Iraqi terror-mongers” predictions to fruition as baddies from all over infiltrated the border and brought that war on terror directly to the Yanks in an attempt to discredit them on a global scale.
Surprise. It worked. Sure as hell proves you gotta be careful what you wish for.
Happy now, Georgie? Just like with Daddy, the Iraq war is ultimately going to be your undoing. Five years from now, the majority of the public will finally be wise to you, Georgie. Ain’t it nice keeping legacies in the family?
And it’ll be thanks to people like Cindy Sheehan.
Sheehan is the mother camping out down the road from the once again-vacationing Bush, the mother who lost her son for a war she initially supported but gradually grew to hate as she learned her son and others were dying for a war that never should’ve been fought.
You disagree? Fought why, for freedom? That wasn’t the reason they gave. They said “weapons of mass destruction.” Instead, it was fought because of invented evidence. It was fought because of lies. It was fought because of greed. Liberal rhetoric, yes, but essentially the truth, too.
Does this story sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s the same one that Michael Moore tried to convince the public of last year in his scathing political flick, Fahrenheit 9/11.
Now, I’m a Michael Moore fan, but I think Michael Moore caused the vote to swing back to Bush. At first Moore was doing great and impacting a lot of undecided voters, but then he hung around too long, too much. He saturated the media and was far too militant and far too angry.
Militance and anger are unattractive qualities in a revolutionary. There’s a fine line you cross that leaves you looking like a radical, and that happened to Moore. He seemed unreasonable, blinded to the possibility of other truths, predisposed to believe only what he wanted. And sometimes he simply wasn’t likeable. He was so riled, so bitter, and it showed, and that’s precisely the opposite of what appeals to the public in Moore.
Funnily, his message was much the same as Cindy Sheehan’s. Bush lied. Evidence was falsified. Boys who could one day be men were dying in a desert for no fucking reason. Rich men got richer. And “freedom” for the Iraqis is a lie, a propaganda tool, at best.
Sheehan, though, is likeable. She’s there, she’s pushing, she’s talking, but she’s passionate while still being respectful. She’s not asking a lot. She’s just asking for the truth. Some of us even feel she deserves it.
There are a lot of moderates in the world, and extremists like Moore can often push buttons that should never be pushed. Moderates will opt for the lesser of evils, the least obnoxious voice, if they’re pushed too hard.
So here we are, with four more years. Perhaps if Sheehan had been more enraged sooner, perhaps if she had started her rallying cry last summer, perhaps we’d have a different president, a different war, and a different story. Unfortunately, she was too busy crying for a son she’d never see again all because of a lie told to the masses for a reason she knew she’d never learn.
I don’t understand how truth became such an elusive commodity, but I’m tired of waiting for a crack in this lie to grow wider. It’s already big enough to swallow a bus, but it just keeps getting filled with Spackle by a media that’s owned by all the big business folks who stand to gain from an Americanized Iraq.
I’m glad Sheehan is a woman of conviction. I’m glad she’s a face that might appeal to a public that might start opening its eyes. I’m glad the question of “what is a patriot” is out there once again, because it’s time the American people realize that a patriot can be someone who hopes for more, who expects the country to deliver what they’re capable of delivering.
It’s time folks realize that the American Dream died decades ago. It’s time to write a new one.
Maybe if more people like Sheehan were to stand up against an administration built on lies, political grandstanding, and corporate kickbacks, it might start to crumble around the foundation, and perhaps integrity could one day return to the oval office.
That’s my new dream for America.
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There’s something to be said for dying for your country because the fight is a good fight. WWII was a fight to the death for the future of the world. We battled the forces of darkness, and won. Had we not done so, we’d all be speaking a strange mixture of German and Japanese - at least those Aryans among us, that is.
Iraq, on the other hand, is an ancient backwater that’s a couple of centuries away from understanding what it takes to be a modern society. George has dug himself a hole so deep that there’s no way he can comfortably extricate himself from the quagmire than this fight has become. That’s what a big mouth will get ya, I guess.
What a massive waste…to think what we could have done with the resources pissed away in the desert.
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Hi Carmi,
As you know, I’m a Jew too, and I have to say, no offense, that I’m sick to death of the “WWII proved that there are times when war is the only answer” bit. It’s a red herring that polarizes the argument - one side demanding that war is an unavoidable part of the human condition, the other coming off as head-in-the-clouds ignorant.
There’s a baseball discussion forum that I frequent, and one of the members has as his signature a quote by Robert F. Kennedy, which is actually a paraphrase of George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”
This is how I feel about the possibility of ending wars altogether - I believe it is a real possibility, and just because it doesn’t seem possible now, doesn’t mean that it can never happen.
Trotting out that line about WWII is too convenient, rhetorically speaking. Using it avoids really addressing what leads to genocide and war and how we can prevent these horrors from occuring, rather than having to fight and kill one group of people in order to save another.
Yes, for now, there are times when we have to fight to save some people, but until we stop believing that there will always be those times, we will be stuck in the cycle of violence.
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Very good writing. I am glad your posting that. I hope you can accept my apology for my less good English Skills, I am from France and English is sort of new to me. I will bookmark your blog and keep reading.