There have to be literally thousands of blogs out there tonight, about to weigh in on the two major news items of the day Iraq and the Johannesburg environmental summit - and god knows with the amount of yammering going on about the predictability of most blogs, it would seem like peeing into a roiling ocean to add anything. But the Bush administration seems to be so wildly full of shit, that I have to just blurt it out, if only to make myself feel like I have a voice at all.
First off, I don't know one living person, you know, in the flesh, who wants this war with Iraq. At first I thought Bush & Co. were just doing the hard-core bluff in order to pre-empt any horseshit Saddam might have coming down the pike, or at least to leverage inspectors back in. But now I truly believe these morons are pushing us further towards bombing the hell out of their country. Yeah, I know, "Saddam must be dealt with," blah blah, etc. etc. but there must be bullet-proof smoking-gun evidence that he is close to possessing nukes and is likely to use them (the first I believe to be true, the latter I certainly do not). Even so, he should be given time to dismantle them, and we should be able to send in inspectors to clean the place up. Sure, this all might be wishful thinking on my part, but unless he is psyched to die a martyr (something he is WAY too much of a petty control freak to do) I think it should be the American way to believe that all people are capable of second acts and redemption.
Given the hostility that the U.S. has been receiving recently (and that includes the European allies whose collective asses we saved 50 years ago), a strike against a country that has never done anything to us seems full-blown insane. Even if it's more complicated than that to Republican think tanks, it sure won't be complicated to a young Islamic teen watching it unfold on Al-fucking-Jazeera. Saddam also has got to have contingency plans in the event of his removal, very likely the clandestine handoff of god-only-knows-what to interested parties who would like to make everyone in Manhattan sick. Suffice to say if this war happens, I'm dragging my family up to the farm for a few months until cooler heads prevail.
The worst of it is this: it's all about oil. Every single bit of it. Bush has some sort of wildcatting gene that throws him into estrus every time fossil fuels get churned into the sky. And Americans are just as bad collectively; 51% of new cars last year were SUVs, with an average fuel economy of, like, 2 miles to the gallon.
Which brings us to the Johannesburg summit, where the USA has basically told the entire planet to fuck off. Never mind that the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere has risen over a degree Fahrenheit in the last ten years alone, never mind that the worst droughts in the world are in the Islamic tinderbox of central Asia, forming a populace more than happy to strike back at the thugs that have 4% of the world's population, yet create 23% of its greenhouse gases (that would be us, for those of you playing at home). Bush's fucking Republican oil-grubbing white racist team of motherfuckers are not only mortgaging away my kids' future, they're basically inviting every country on Earth to hate us even more. Is there a master plan that I don't get, or are they the stupidest bunch of rednecks ever to cheat their way into running the free world?
And still, Americans don't care. They'll continue to vote for Bush and his limp-dicked cronies because they fear regime change while we're "at war." More than likely, the rest of America has been anesthetized by the glacial breeze of their Navigator's air conditioning unit, by the untold liters of Starbucks frappucinos, and by the constant re-runs of "Friends" on digital cable. Meanwhile, a young man in the parched basin of what used to be Iran's great Lake Hamoun will look across the cracked ground and begin to seethe with rage, and I don't blame him one god-damned bit. I look across my cracked psyche at the White House and feel the same way.
Posted by at September 4, 2002 8:46 PM