I sent out a plea I received from MoveOn.org regarding the pResident’s request for $87 Billion to rebuild Iraq (for more info, see http://www.moveon.org/firerumsfeld/. My father sent back this reply:
Ruddy, while I applaude your zeal and I agree we are in a real donnybrook in Iraq, we cannot bail on those people. We cannot just walk out. I know you weren’t around during WWII, but we had to go back into Germany after the war and rebuild the country for them, which was a much more difficult problem than we face in Iraq. Since not bailing on that country, we have become good friends with them — unlike our Russian counterpart. We cannot withhold funds. If we do, we will strangle our military. We would, in effect, be saying, “Hey sorry you need more men and material, but we’ve decided we don’t like Bush and his buddies, so…eat it.” We don’t do that to our troops, we did in Nam and we were the laughing stock of the Western World when we were kicked out. I was pretty radical myself during the Viet Nam fiasco, but I don’t see Iraq in the same light. I believe we lost (???) that war because Congress was running it. Now what I hear from the fuzzy heads in Congress is “hey, I know what, let’s yank our folks out of Iraq…we really don’t need their oil, and besides, they talk funny and they aren’t WASP enough for us. For godsake let’s not backup what we said we would do for their country. Let’s not do what we all voted to do. Let’s reneg. And how do we do it? Why we just won’t give those war mongering generals and that that funny talking Bush any more money. That’ll show em.”
No Ruddy, we started this and we have to see it through. It doesn’t matter if there are Weapons of Mass Distruction or not. (that’s really a non-issue at this point) We must keep our word!!! We’ve always been known as a paper tiger and a bunch of fools by the Europeans. If we fold, we’ll just be saying, “you are right we were just kidding in Iraq. Sorry, we’ll move out as soon as possible and leave the country in utter chaos. They aren’t like us anyway. And they talk funny. Oh, and they wear those funny long-johns. We don’t particularly like em in the first place and their oil is dirty.”
…
Anyway, I pass on this issue even though I belong to the Democratic Party and take their newsletter and support nearly all dems. I haven’t voted for a Republican since…since….all my voting life. Since age 18.
(And of course, I had to reply…)
Ah, but you misread the intent of the e-mail. I do not want to bail out of Iraq; I want Bush to give up the arrogance of thinking we can go it alone. Withhold the $87B until we start to see a multilateral solution in Iraq. His appearance at the UN a few days ago was shameful! He said, in essence, “We were right, we’re keeping all the power, we’ll take all the oil profits, but your cute li’l blue helmet guys should come in and do the dirty work of keeping order. Oh, and by the way, would you give us some money to help fix this mess?”
But also, some of your points are misdirected. Yes, we went into Germany after WWII with the Marshall Plan, but you’re comparing apples and oranges. Germany unconditionally surrendered – Iraq never has. Not a single US soldier was killed by hostile fire during the Marshall Plan. Germany was a country with a fixed army that had declared war on its neighbors – Iraq was a country minding its own business and our enemies are guerilla insurgents and terrorists from Saudi Arabia. Also, the rebuilding of Germany was a multilateral plan involving the British, French, and Russians (which later led to the Berlin Wall… well, I guess that was bad) – rebuilding Iraq is a profit machine for Halliburton.
I also disagree that the WMD’s are a non-issue. We were sold this war on the premise that Saddam could launch deadly attacks against us or our allies within 45 minutes, and that he had tons of stockpiles of these chemical and biological agents, and that he was close to having nukes (http://www.lunaville.org/WMD/billmon.aspx). All lies, as we can see now.
This whole undertaking is all part of a grand scheme hatched by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC – http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/2003/01/27/news/local/5025024.htm). This think talk, composed of many current Bush misAdministration officials, had outlined as early as 1996 the desire to establish American hegemony over the Middle East. Their lust for the vast oil reserves of the Caspian Basin required a military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran… just wait), but they were tempered by the fact that the American People would not willingly send their soldiers to die in the desert for Halliburton’s / ExxonMobil’s profit margins. They knew they would need some sort of galvanizing event to turn the political tide.
Enter 9/11, which, suspiciously enough, the Bush misAdministration did very little to prevent. The more research I uncover, the odder that day has become. For example, there’s standing orders that require fighter jets to be scrambled to intercept any jet airliner that deviates more than 15 degrees from its flight path (http://pages.infinit.net/fmgoyeau/911c04a.html), yet on 9/11, four jet airliners were off-path for over half an hour, and no jet fighters were ever ordered into the air (until it was too late), despite the fact that all of them flew over numerous military bases. Also we have the failure of the CIA and FBI to “connect the dots” even though their field agents were sending memos and reports of Saudis with terrorist ties taking flight lessons with no interest in landing, just steering.
It harkens back to FDR having foreknowledge of the planned attacks on Pearl Harbor, but then doing nothing to stop it (http://www.liberty-tree.org/ltn/dayofdeceit.html), so that we’d have a galvanizing event that would shift the political will of the country from isolationism to war. Or LBJ lying about the Gulf of Tonkin (http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html) to get us deeper into the Vietnam War. It took over 50,000 American lives lost and many years before the public could force the politicians into getting out of Vietnam. We’re up to about 400 American lives in Iraq and 3000 lives on September 11th – all so the neocons can fulfill their dream of conquering the Middle East and gobbling up their oil.
I say no more blank checks for the Bush misAdministration. No $87B of our money until we garner some international support in this effort. No $87B of our money until rebuilding contracts in Iraq are opened up for bids, instead of gifting those contracts to Halliburton. Yes, we need to keep our word and bring freedom, democracy, education, and infrastructure to Iraq, but we need help in doing so. (Also, while we’re at it, how about bringing some of those same things to America?)
Osama bin Laden roams the Earth, releasing tapes to motivate the mujahadeen (sort of like the Islamic Tony Robbins), even though Bush said we would get him “dead or alive”. Saddam Hussein roams the Earth, providing a figurehead for the Baathists and insurgents, even though Bush made him the “Ace of Spades”. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, even though Bush said there were tons of it to be found. The international goodwill toward America so much in surplus after 9/11 has been pissed away by our arrogant cowboy pResident, much like our fiscal surplus after Clinton.
I guess it’s a good thing Bush isn’t fooling around with an intern — then there’d be hell to pay!
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