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BS ‘n’ About…
The Iraqi Quagmire
Saddam screwed up, proving to be just another coward in bully’s clothing, another greedy little dictator with allusions to grandeur, another rat we had to dig out of a hidey-hole. He was a bad man. But he screwed up.
Imagine this alternative-reality nightmare. We turn on the six o’clock news and there is Saddam, all decked out in his finest petty dictator regalia. He’s sitting in the Presidential Suite of the swankiest hotel in Paris, holding a news conference and demanding his country back. There were no weapons of mass destruction. He had no ties with September 11th or Bin Laden. His regime posed no imminent threat to the ‘Homeland Security’ of the United States. Our every justification for removing him from power had so far proved groundless, if not downright fabricated. America might be the big dog on the block, but you can be sure the rest of the pack would have banded together and eaten us alive. Yep. Saddam screwed up.
There is no doubt he was a bad man. That doesn’t change the fact that we had no right to remove him from power. You can be sure the Iraqis see it this way. And by now, so does most of the rest of the world. Until we bring our viewpoint a little more in line with everybody else’s, Iraq will simmer and boil.
Think about it. We drop bombs on these people, destroy their infrastructure, crash their economy, bring gunfire to their streets, and unleash ethnic, religious, and cultural tensions that have been simmering for thousands of years. Then we have the audacity to proclaim ourselves liberators and anoint ourselves ultimate arbiter of Iraqi justice and architect of the future of the Iraqi nation.
And we have the gall to say we’re doing it in the name of freedom. But free is only as free as the choices it entails. What if they want a fundamentalist Islamic government? What if they want to turn Communist and follow the teachings of Mao? What if they want to break up into a bunch of little nations? What if they don’t want their streets littered with Coke machines and Ford dealerships? What if they want to turn pacifist and quit spending their oil monies with our military-industrial complex?
Are these choices we’ll be ‘giving’ the Iraqi people after we ‘free’ them? We say we’re liberators, not conquerors, but we all know the plan was to leave behind burger joints, video stores and lots of advisors when the army left. Let’s see the Iraqi people vote their way out of that one.
We can drape ourselves in all the patriotism and spin-doctoring we want, but at the end of the day we are conquerors and occupiers, not liberators. You know they see it this way. Not one Iraqi asked us to liberate them from Saddam. Not one Iraqi wants us to set up a Quisling government for them. Saddam’s palaces and torture chambers were built with American oil dollars. The next guy’s will be too. Until we quit lying to ourselves and everybody else, we have no hope of reaching the Iraqi people. Until we start doing things differently, our kids will go on dying over there.
So where do we start? How about with the Iraqi people? If Jabloomie needs a school, why not give the money directly to the Jabloomie town council? Let them build their school. Instead we give it to a Haliburton, pass it through a few international banks, grease a few Iraqi Quislings, and Jabloomie gets about five cents worth of school for its dollar. How do you think we pay for all those ridiculous Fortune 500 compensation packages and perks? Where do the Saddams of this world get the bucks to build those insulting palaces? From you, me, and Jabloomie. That’s who.
Our foreign policy of throwing mine and your tax dollars at potentially advantageous little tyrants, then being outraged when they get too big for their britches, has to stop somewhere. If it doesn’t stop in Iraq we’ll still be shipping body bags home next millennium.
Iraq is a quagmire. Like Vietnam, we’re up against a culture and people so different from ours that if we’re there a thousand years, we still won’t understand what’s going on. Unlike Vietnam, no one in Iraq ever asked us to help them, nor seems to want our help now that we’re there. But people are people. And food is food, schools is schools, and hospitals is hospitals. Give these things to the people, not the instruments of their oppression for a change, and we might just have a chance. Actually care about those people instead of trying to get rich off their misfortune, and the future looks a little brighter. We might even start being perceived as the good guys again. What a concept!
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