Curiouser and Curiouser
I’ve kept mostly non-political here on Floorpie Dot Net, but for those of you who didn’t know: I’m pretty much a bleeding heart liberal.
In fact, I’m such a bleeding-heart liberal that I even show up socialist on the McCarthy Radar. Yes, that’s right, I’m a dirty commie. Before you all gasp, you must realize that our common ideas of socialism and communism are largely based on the former Soviet Union, which, as anyone will tell you, was an extraordinarily flawed example of communism. Same goes for China. The basic idea of communism, however, is actually pretty intriguing, and something I could get behind. Unfortunately, like Utopian societies, it is fairly impossible to pull off effectively (as in the USSR), and in reality I’m probably far too greedy to step in line. Cool idea in theory, though.
This is not the point.
The point is that I feel this whole war with Iraq thing is one of the worst US acts to have happened in my lifetime, and possibly in our history. Killing off the Native Americans: bad. Slavery: bad. Oppression of women: bad. Gulf War, Part Deux: very bad.
Perhaps it is the patriotic-tinted history books of my education, but I at least feel we were justified in entering the Big One, the One After the Big One, the MASH one, and The Platoon One. Those seemed to be for good causes. The Gulf war, although about oil, was at least marginally justified as one country was invading another. But this most recent conflict? I can’t find the justification.
Putting aside the conspiracy theory that this is in someway designed to distract us from the fact that we haven’t heard anything about, oh I don’ t know… Osama bin Laden, in literally MONTHS, and going along with the whole impending-doom-weapons-of-mass-destruction jive we’re hearing, where’s the proof? Here are my points:
.: North Korea, who we’ve been at real war with, who’s told us they’re going to develop nuclear weapons, who’s threatened us… gets diplomacy
.: North Korea has missiles, and many American forces within it’s reach, to bomb. US response? Diplomacy
.: Iraq, however, has never, and still continues to not, have the capability to launch a weapon of any real magnitude much farther than it’s borders. Frankly, it takes a hell of a lot to launch something half way around the world, and baby, we’re simply out of reach. US response? WAR!
.: the UN inspectors have found nothing. Sure, a few empty canisters, but that is about a thousand orders of magnitude away from a weapon of “mass destruction”. Besides, no one said they couldn’t have a few missiles to defend themselves with. US response: WAR!
.: Germany, France, and even Great Britain start to back out of US support due to lack of evidence. US response? WAR!
I’m not saying that with all this, we should at least shout WAR! at Korea, too. I’m just saying it seems awfully strange that the one that seems to be more of a threat than the other gets the diplomacy. I wonder why? Because there’s no oil in Korea perhaps?
This article says two things: (1) UN inspectors give Iraq a “B” on their inspections. They’ve found nothing, they’ve been largely cooperative, and everything is hunky-dorey. (2) US sources say that Iraq plans to destroy their own oil fields if we attack them, and the US will protect them at all costs.
Nothing about an “axis of evil”, “evil doers”, “terrorists”, or anything… just that we’ll protect the precious precious oil. Interesting.
A while ago, I gave the president the benefit of the doubt. I assumed that he really had some knowledge that there were weapons of mass destruction, but he didn’t want to admit it, perhaps because of the way we got it. Maybe we payed-off Osama to tell us and let him go, maybe Bush slept with one of Saddam’s wives, maybe he got it out of a fortune cookie… whatever the case, I thought the only way he could be such a sword rattler was because he really had something. Well, with your allies leaving you, your inspectors disagreeing with you, and the whole world hating you, don’t you think now is the time to swallow your pride and fess up?
Or maybe he’s just a war-monger that loves his daddy and wants to kill the bad man. Time will tell.
PS if you made it this far, you get a cookie