Us and Them

Our computer is currently out of commission and there's not a lot of time for writing here at work, so here in the meantime is a "guest blog" from brother John:

"It just makes me madder," Bob Mansen, a retired electric company manager, said as he waited to have his hair cut at Art's Barber Shop on Main Street in Oswego, Illinois. "Let's kill them all. Let's wipe them off the face of the earth. This is war, even though a lot of people don't realize it. They’re certainly at war with us, and I'd rather fight them over there than have to fight them here." (New York Times, May 13, 2004)

And the Times quotes Rush Limbaugh from his radio program: "They're the ones who are sick. They're the ones who are perverted. They are the ones who are dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman. They are the ones who are human debris, not the United States of America and not our soldiers and not our prison guards."

Now wait just one dog garn minute here. I thought we ended up fighting this war to liberate "them." Wasn't that the fallback justification? There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There are no nuclear arms in Iraq. There are -- well, WERE -- no Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda. And there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11. But all that didn’t matter in the end, because this was, after all, "Operation Iraqi Freedom”, right? As our mother said when I challenged her on the legitimacy of this war: "I thought you people were for human rights." Doesn't liberating "them” from Saddam justify an otherwise unjustifiable war?

So what happened to "them"? Well, now, "they" are perverted, dangerous, subhuman, human debris and we should kill "them" all and wipe "them" off the face of the earth.

This is hardly surprising. The right wing always wants to have it both ways. In fact, right wing ideology is a mythology built on contradictory arguments. Deficits were bad; deficits are good. Homosexuals were pedophiles and perverts; homosexuals are a threat to marriage because they want to get married and raise families. All life, from the moment of conception, is to be defended; capital punishment, nuclear armament, unjustifiable war are all to be defended. We are going to war against Iraq because Iraq is an imminent threat to the U.S.; we are going to war to liberate the Iraqi people. This works in mythology. A mythology does not have to make sense. One myth in the mythology does not have to agree with all the other myths. But this does not work in reality.

The reality is that there was no justification for this war. Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the United States. Religious organizations around the world, among them the Roman Catholic Church, The Anti-Defamation Commission of B'nai B'rith and the National Council of Churches, condemned this war as "unjust”.

The reality is that the war and its aftermath (are we at the aftermath yet?) were neither well planned nor well executed by the neo-cons at the Pentagon. In fact, General Eric K. Shinseki, the Chief of Staff of the Army, was forced into early retirement when he insisted that the Secretary of Defense had underestimated the number of troops needed to win the war.

The reality is that the bad planning for the war and the lack of planning for what came after major combat ceased have led to the infiltration of Islamic terrorists into Iraq, have resulted in the atrocities at Abu Ghraib committed by under-trained and understaffed reserve forces, and have manifested a deadly lack of security for both Iraqi civilians and American civilians working in Iraq.

The right wing wants to start pointing fingers at "them." Get real. The problem for the right is that the "they" who are to blame for the fiasco in Iraq have names: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz... Man oh man, where does this list end?

All right, I'm all for it. Let's get rid of them. Vote the liar out of office in November. Iraq cannot be rebuilt without the help of the rest of the world. But the rest of the world distrusts -- all right, loathes --George Bush and his administration. It is only under a new administration that we have a chance to enlist other nations to help "them" in Iraq build a peaceful, secure country.