If you are reading this it is Wednesday and the near future has war written all over it, just in time for the upcoming election year.
Oh yeah, and the best part is: there is nothing we can do about it.
A sense of hopelessness pervades, eh? I know the feeling. Although I’m not asking you to give in, to cradle yourself in the fetal position and begin umbilical reattachment, as of Friday, war seems pretty imminent, whether we wish to care or not.
Friday offered up a valentine from Dr. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, to the Security Council of the United Nations. although the United States has already decided to wage on with Iraq no matter what anyone says. France? Duplicitous cowards. Germans? Anti-American socialists. Belgium? Bel-ha-ha-ha! Ha! Good one. The American Public? Who?
Over the weekend, the world united to protest the inevitable U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In dozens of cities in the United States and around the world, millions of people gathered to voice opposition to the proposed war in Iraq. Acting as a sponge, this outpouring of world opinion soaked up any of the remaining momentum that Colin Powell had left around the U.N. after his Feb. 5 debriefing to the skeptical members of the Security Council. And as if the voices of millions of people from all over the world wasn’t enough of a deterrent from war (which it would appear it is not) for Mr. Bush and Co., opposition arose from one of the most unlikely places: our own allies.
Over the last few days, NATO, the Transatlantic Alliance felt a few oceans amongst its shivery timbers as France, Belgium and Germany all voiced their disapproval at what seems to be the unstoppable forward momentum of the Bush-led military machine, as it crashes through walls of reason and diplomacy, all the while approaching the Persian Gulf at breakneck speed.
The unwillingness of our longtime allies to participate in Bush’s personal crusade only proves to me that this whole incident has been larger than an undisclosed number of innocent Iraqi citizens feeling the pains of war. Our forward motion predicts their jaws will drop agape at falling debris striking Baghdad not too long from now, and peace will finally come to Iraq, but only at the cost of how many bodies lying scattered on broken streets underneath yellow clouds of chemical residue?
The United States has basically decided to find rhetoric in a large number of U.N. documents, dating from the Gulf War to the Gulf Spring (which is what they are calling our new Iraqi endeavor) and fill in the loopholes of these documents with unmanned drones, patriotically known as U2s everywhere but Ireland, no matter what the world of people or politics has to say about it.
For all of our outspoken leaders’ testimonies of Hussein’s indifferent, unilateral attitude toward the world, from our recent actions, wouldn’t that be something that we could agree upon with him?
So as of last week, when the color wheel of terror turned bright orange for the first time since there were times of color wheel panic, the United States has sufficiently stocked the Middle-East with enough Midwest beef to keep Baghdad in a Happy Meal frenzy for the beginning of a 10-year occupation. Both the Navy Times and the Marine Corps Times are informing outbound soldiers of the benefits of long-term sperm storage in the wake of fears of impotence that have arisen since the chemical mishaps of the Gulf War.
These soldiers, whether their minions are with them or in a deep freeze, are being deployed to the Gulf region by the thousands. The threat of war is no longer a threat, but the inevitable enactment of a few bad prophecies spoken by the mouthpiece of fear itself, George W. Bush.
President Bush enjoys spinning this war out of loosely knit “what ifs” and “maybes.”
If we do not stop a destitute nation now, they may attack us in the future. No matter what proof we can obtain or produce, Mr. Bush has a gut feeling that will get a lot of innocent people killed. Whether they are American or Iraqi is of no importance to death. The actuality that this operation is only a thinly-layered attempt at vengeance has not been lost on many Americans, yet the popularity of a military operation grows as our troops are dispatched to the Gulf region, while our economy dwindles at the dawn of an expensive military operation. This reality has also not been ignored by a few nations of the European Union and NATO, as well as millions of people who took to the streets despite the orange horror of the color wheel.
There is nothing yet that links Saddam Hussein’s government to al-Qaida. There is no evidence that Iraq is trying to build nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator. This is a self-evident fact. The question is, though, when did it become our business to rid the world of ruthless dictators? It has not.
This is not a war about liberating oppressed peoples, this is a war about waging war. It has turned from a conflict into an international pissing contest in which the United States has set out to prove it has the longest warhead.