In case you missed it the other night, George Bush took no responsibility for plunging the U.S. and Iraq into a catastrophic war from which there seems to be no exit. To some observers, he appeared to shoulder the onus, but he didn’t.
Early in the speech, Bush praised American troops for bravery and following orders, and then added, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” He didn’t say that he made any mistakes, only that someone had…maybe. In other words, he is taking the blame for the unspecified mistakes of others, presumably one of the people he recently fired or demoted, if they happened at all.
But that was merely one sentence. What followed was a litany of accusations against Iraqis and their neighbors—pretty much all of them, excepting the innocent, many of whom are already too dead to hear themselves exonerated by the American president. He blames Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, al-Qaida, Iran, Syria, various foreigners and unidentified murderers. By implication, he blames the Iraqi police and army, since he again has to bail them out with a fresh infusion of American troops.
At no time does he accept, or even recognize, that the reason Americans and Iraqis are dying in Iraq is because he ordered an invasion. And since the reasons for the invasion have been proven to be, without any doubt whatsoever, spurious, he has a lot more to atone for than tactical mistakes.
Instead, he blathered on about freedom and the white man’s burden, currently being fulfilled by our armed forces, “as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East.” It seems like just yesterday that were doing the same for American Indians, and in much the same fashion—minus the technology.
Our military, then, is just there to help the downtrodden. For some reason he didn’t mention the some 100,000 contractors who are there not to help Iraqis, but to help themselves—to some of the $400 billion poured into the still-recumbent semi-nation. We wouldn’t get into these messes, he intimated, if we weren’t so doggone good-hearted. Fooey.
What I wasn’t expecting, though, was to hear an identical theme sung by the opposition. Senator Richard Durbin, chosen to speak for the party, attacked not the war, but only the new escalation. The problem, he said, quoting lately-sacked General John Abizaid, was that more troops would prevent the Iraqis from fighting the war we started for themselves.
It’s time, then, for the Iraqis to be men. For almost four years now, we’ve been engaged in a kind of hand-holding exercise, and still they fail us. “And we have given the Iraqis so much,” Durbin stated.” We have deposed their dictator. We dug him out of a hole in the ground and forced him to face the courts of his own people. We've given the Iraqi people a chance to draft their own constitution, hold their own free elections and establish their own government.” Not only did we selflessly do all this, but we were the only ones with the gumption to do it. “We Americans and a few allies,” said Durbin with no apparent irony, “have protected Iraq when no one else would.” Anyone else want some of that protection? Probably not.
And Dick Durbin’s one of the better senators. Does he believe this nonsense? Do any of them? Or do they say it because they assume Americans can’t stand anything stronger? I suspect most Americans can take it, if only because it makes more sense than what we’re hearing.
If the political leadership wants to pretend we’re up to our asses in corpses out of sheer goodness, I can’t stop them. But the inevitable result of that fiction is a world that is totally insane. In this vision, an endless stream of dusky foreigners, possessed by evil creeds, continually lure us into their countries and then, in a fit of homicidal ingratitude, turn on us.
No wonder half our adult citizens can’t find France on a map. The world is just too dangerous for them to venture into, unless they’re heavily armed…and even that doesn’t work so well any more. This can’t go on. Americans don’t deserve the truth, they need the truth. And on Wednesday night, they didn’t hear it.
--Alec Dubro |
Friday, January 12, 2007 10:56 AM
