Demolition mission accomplished
Washington under
Bush is making grave errors that will affect our future for
generations to come
Maziar Shirazi
September 17, 2004
iranian.com
Republicans are happy right now. They have something
on the Democrats that has consistently kept them ahead of the game.
You can hear it from the House of Representatives in D.C. to the
House of Pancakes on Route 527 in central Jersey; one of the most
effective arguments that certain Americans use in favor of President
Bush and his administration is that he is a strong, determined
leader that has what it takes to win the so-called "war on
terror".
In this day and age, strong, determined leadership
is essential to maintaining the integrity and safety of our nation
and that of others. One of our real needs is to be safer than
we were three years ago, and although whether or not people do
feel
safer is a question for the pollsters, if we are actually safer
is a matter that should concern all of us.
The purpose of this
article is to suggest answers to two questions: are we safer
than we were three years ago, and is it because Bush has been
a strong
leader?
*** So far, we have invaded and toppled two regimes that at one
point were supported financially, politically, and militarily
by us:
the Taliban thug-ocracy of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship in Iraq. Are we safer? Well, 1000 troops have
died in Iraq alone, and we are losing the war day by day:
the Sunni
Triangle, handed over to undertrained and unmotivated Iraqi
troops in a most cowardly fashion to avoid having to deal
with the resistance
ourselves, is now in large part under the control of various
insurgents. They are not just Baathist loyalists and foreign
terrorists either.
We just had to negociate a truce with the Shiite
fighters in Najaf; it is established now that we cannot simply
overpower
the insurgents
because they have formidable support among the diverse
peoples of Iraq and they are not going to start liking us anytime
soon.
Islamic extremist organizations, once suppressed and clandestine
in Iraq, are having a recruiter's dream openly signing
up
Iraqis and people across the Muslim world to fight our
troops.
We have betrayed our closest allies in Iraq, the
Kurds, by
not protecting their rights or acknowledging their tremendous
help
in toppling Saddam Hussein. The New York Times quoted
the situation earlier this year: It's not just that we have been
misled by
the Americans, said a high-ranking Kurdish official.
It's
also that
they change their position day to day without any focus
on real strategy in Iraq. There's a level of mismanagement and
incompetence
that is shocking.
These are the sentiments of many Kurdish people
who have every reason to be supportive of the U.S. efforts in
Iraq, people
who have wanted independence from Hussein's brutal
regime from the time that Rumsfeld shook hands with him. They
are also
the
sentiments of many concerned American citizens, myself
included; we feel that in addition to being deceived
by the Bush administration,
we are putting ourselves further and further at risk
for catastrophic consequences by the sometimes outright
idiotic
and irresponsible
decisions made that we as Americans will have to face
the consequences for.
Bush has demolished our image
throughout the world; public
opinion of the U.S. across the world is at an all-time
low, especially in the Muslim world. Bush used false
information
to go to war
with Iraq, which at best is a testament to his and
his administration's
crushing incompetence, dragging us into a war for,
apparently, no particular reason at all. It's certainly not about
freedom and justice: we had no problem with Hussein's
atrocities
against his own people when he was cooperating
with us,
and we certainly didn't hesitate to sell chemical
weapons to
Iraq so that he could gas and bomb Iranians easier,
or to turn around
and sell weapons to Iran so that we could make
even more money off the deaths of others.
In Afghanistan, where the only significant
U.S. forces presence is felt in the still-embattled capital,
we have all but left
the majority of the country to deal with the Taliban,
who are still
not defeated and continue murdering civilians daily
with impunity, and although Bush wants us to, let's
not forget
about al-Qaeda
and its at-large leader, Osama bin Laden. Think
that they are weaker than they were in 2001?
The sad truth
is that
Pakistan
remains
unable to control its population's own fundamentalist
segment and its burgeoning recruiting efforts
on the border, and
no one knows what is going to happen if the next
assassination attempt
on President Musharraf succeeds. There have certainly
been enough attempts on his life in a short amount
of time to
increase
the
probability of that occurring. The very real
possibility that the government of Pakistan, with its nuclear
bombs, could soon
fall
into the hands of Islamic extremists is not a
desirable one.
The Middle East and the Muslim world is as volatile
as it has ever been, terrorists have as much
support and
power as they
have ever
had, and it is not despite the efforts of the
Bush administration, it is because of them. The criteria
for going to war
is basically
"if the President wants to" at this point when
it should by all means be the last resort, approved
by an overwhelming
majority
in Congress and, if we have common sense, by
the rest of the world
i.e. the majority of the United Nations.
It is
the
mark of mental
weakness and immaturity to support unilateral
policy and to think that the rest of the civilized world
wouldn't support a justified
war; we had that support for Afghanistan, but
not for Iraq,
which was and still is a travesty that has
exacted the lives of more
than 1000 U.S. troops, the vast majority of
them young kids who were lied to and paid for our
President's mental weakness
with their lives (to say nothing of the more
than 11,000
Iraqi
civilians).
We need to admit before it is too
late and more innocents
die that this administration, whether accidently
or intentionally, is making grave errors
that will affect
our future for
generations to come and has no place being
in charge of our government.
One last point: there are seven nations listed
on the Congressional Research Service's report
on terrorist
trends as "state
sponsors of terrorism". It is an insult to
all of us
that Saudi Arabia, the home base of Islamic
fundamentalism worldwide,
is not on this list.
In fact, the most active
state proponent of Islamic extremism worldwide
is lauded
by the Bush
administration as a great ally of the U.S.
in combating terror, when Dick
Gannon, former director of operations for
the Office of Counterterrorism, observed all the
way back
in 1998 that
"We've got information
about who's backing bin Laden and, in a
lot of cases, it goes back to the royal family." Needless
to say,
in addition
to having backed al-Qaeda in the past,
it has funneled monstrous sums of money to Hamas through
a variety
of seedy charity
fronts. What inspires us to invade Iraq,
which has no ties whatsoever
to
al-Qaeda or any Muslim extremist organization
for that matter, and then do business (and
lots of
it) with
Saudi Arabia?
I see
a strong leader acknowledging that connection,
ignoring the fact that Saudi Arabia controls
a large portion
of our economy,
and
at the very least imposing serious economic
sanctions on that medieval kingdom and supporting reformist
efforts within the
country. A
president who has direct and personal
business connections in Saudi Arabia, however, might
just sit back and
hope that America
doesn't
notice.
What all this amounts to is that we are
not winning any war, not in Iraq, not
on "terror",
and certainly
not
against Islamic extremism, which is
unfortunately flourishing because
of the ruin that we have inflicted
on Iraq. There is no war
on terrorism;
you cannot, as many have noted, fight
a war against a military tactic. What
this
mobilization
of
our troops, taxes, and
talents actually amounts to is a revenge
fantasy for Americans, with
lots of people behind the scenes making
lots of money and pushing demented
agendas.
Many of us are justifying
Bush's irresponsible and weak-minded decisions
because we feel like
somebody, "the
terrorists", be it a 15 year-old
Iraqi Christian in the
resistance or some dinosaur of a
dictator, needs to suffer for September
11th, and we have exhausted the issue
of the WTC falling from every angle
except the one that matters: why
did it happen?
Here's my theory: it happened
because
America
has treated
the Muslim
world as a colony for the past
100 years and has killed, humiliated, and alienated
many,
many people. If this
at all rings a bell
for those who support Bush's foreign
policy, perhaps they should rethink
the merits
of temporarily subjugating
a
people for
whom
hatred of America will boil for
years. If one in a million of the
total number of people we've subjugated
in this war becomes a terrorist,
it will be
more than
sufficient to repeat
the devastation wreaked by just
19 young individuals on September
the 11th.
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