Terrorists R Us

Terrorists R Us:

Of all the lame excuses for the U.S. war in Iraq, the one that has always troubled me the most is the Bush Administration’s oft-repeated: “It’s better to fight the terrorists over there than here in the streets of America!”

Unless, of course, you happen to be a citizen of Iraq! The statistics today tell a tragic story: according to the website www.iraqbodycount.net, well over 34,000 Iraqis have died since the start of Bush’s “vanity war” in March 2003. Dozens of new deaths are reported every day. Moreover, despite the Bush Administration’s constant drumbeat of upbeat pabulum on Iraq, the Iraqis themselves are voting with their feet, some 100,000 having fled their homes and/or the country itself, according to no less an authority than one of Iraq’s own Vice-Presidents!

The situation seems to careen from bad to worse. As reported recently in several major national newspapers (the Sioux City Journal excluded, of course), a late March 2006 poll by the International Republican Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., found Iraqis extremely pessimistic about the current state of their nation. 52% of Iraqis polled now think their country is moving in the wrong direction, believing that jobs are scarcer, wages lower, basic services like electricity poorer, and the country less secure and more politically divided than before. An impressive 68% of respondents cited corruption as a serious problem in daily life. Most tellingly, in a situation of such pervasive and extreme insecurity, a pitiful 1% of respondents reported having trust in American troops for their protection (for the full report, go to www.iri.org).

Meanwhile, back in the States we have General Michael Hayden, the second-ranking intelligence official on Iraq, giving official confirmation in a recent speech in Texas of what we war critics have long suspected: U.S. military activities in Iraq are serving as inspiration for, and a recruitment tool of, anti-American jihadists! “Fortunately,” General Hayden was able to keep sight of the Bush Administration’s “big picture;” after we defeat the jihadists in Iraq, their movement worldwide will be seriously weakened, the General added reassuringly.

So we’ve come full circle. The U.S. has to maintain a military presence in Iraq, the Bushies claim, so as to defeat an anti-American insurgency sustained by that very same U.S. military presence!

Is it just me, or does it sometimes seem like Joseph Heller’s 1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder is running things our Middle East policy?! “Catch 22” is back!

During the initial U.S. roll-over of Iraq’s armed forces in March of 2003, I remember being politely chided by a local TV newscaster about the seemingly overwhelming American “victory” (I admit to having been a bit of a pessimist in earlier on-air interviews). “Defeating the Iraqi military is the easy part. It’s winning the peace afterwards that we need to worry about,” I recall saying. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration just hates to let troublesome details spoil its vision of reality, and so we now find ourselves in the eminently predictable morass of Iraqi sectarian civil war.

Yet, the majority of Americans seem content to try and ignore the violence in Iraq as best they can. It is, after all, over there! Hardly anyone can even place Iraq on a map of the world. And we assuage our nagging doubts over allowing our own government to wreak such havoc on an innocent land by burying reports of such devastation in the back section of the local newspaper, or by accepting at face value the Administration’s morally suspect defense of “Better over there than over here!”

What do you think will happen when the Iraqi people finally figure out whose real best interests we’re serving?

Peace!
Historian