To Tell the Truth: The president’s explanatory speech about our latest military incursion into, this time, Libya was delivered succinctly and well. It reminded me of so many others in US military history of, most especially, the past century. I kept hearing as I have decades before about the always “helpful,” spread of democracy through US invasion. From the World War I edict making the Wilsonian world “safe for democracy” fast forwarding almost a century to Libya our president delivers yet another, tired, tedious message with yet another tired tedious rationale for war. Again, again and again the US desire is to attempt merely to set one country or another free so democracy and human rights can take root. T’were American leadership so concerned with our own human rights at home!
The President’s somnambulant speech rang to me hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s speech delivered on August 5, 1964 did lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It gave the US cover to conduct a full scale war undeclared in Vietnam for nearly a decade which ultimately incurred nearly 60,000 American dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, one million Vietnamese killed and a Vietnamese country side devastated by chemical defoliation Agent Orange responsible for birth defects today. I have written often on endless, perpetual, constant war with no end in sight ultimately costing our country in precious blood and trillions in treasure. It is always justified by a theater-of-the-absurd rationale which allows the sheeple to allow the carnage with no ability to question the nourishment of the pabulum they are fed.
The illogical inconsistencies are glaring. After the horrific 2001 attack on the Trade Towers in New York, the Iraq War ensued in 2003. It was justified to remove a dictator because the US was 100% sure he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Of course, he did not have them and the Bush cabal managed in brilliant form to bamboozle the American public wounded from the 2001 dastardly attacks. Why did we furnish Sadam Hussein weapons years before when Iraq was at war with Iran? Later Iraqis loyal to Hussein would use those very weapons to kill American soldiers. Ah politics! One can count on the fact things political will often not be the least bit rational. I would not mind that but we are not playing a game. We are talking about human beings sent to their deaths or inflicting and incurring horrifically permanent injury upending the course of human life both of our soldiers who fight it and the innocents who are simply part of the psychopathic term “collateral damage.” Collateral damage; I wonder if it were YOUR child or YOUR life’s love if you would refer to their death at the hands of an enemy as “collateral damage.”
So I ask: Why Libya and why not Darfur, Syria, Saudi Arabia and ultimately even Iran when it cracks the heads of its own people who allegedly want democratic change? The questions and the hypocrisies are endless. War, any war can be justified by a US president IF he uses the words humanitarian and democracy in the same breath.
If ONLY our leaders would wax more honest. I could take that. When they take me for a fool and put one over on the unknowing, unquestioning and unaware, American public who will be the ones to fight leadership’s wars, a cerebral explosion within me occurs.
Our ventures are, of course, NOT about spreading democracy, however, advantageous or disadvantageous that would be. Our rationales are about empire and most especially, in that geographical locale, to keep the oil flowing through the Suez and the Strait of Hormuz to the rest of the world! Okay, I’ll buy that!
So far the Saudi sheiks are in control of their huge oil reserve and we want it that way. We want stability for one of the largest oil depositories in the world – the Middle East. If Bush had been interested in visiting punishment on a nation responsible for 911 he should have chosen Saudi Arabia since 15 of the 19 fanatical Islamics who perpetrated it came from there, but he didn't. There is good reason for that and oil, of course, is the answer. One cannot bite the hand that feeds one. Our wars are with nations we can clearly defeat and ones which our footprint is and stays on or near oil's soil. Hegemony and control in that region is the ONLY rationale that makes sense because the other rationale the president gives makes NO sense. Libya feeds Europe oil so they will, of course, be interested in deposing Kaddafi and facilitating – WE HOPE – stability at a revolutionary time. Does one think the rebels in Libya are so humane? I suspect not. I suspect they have committed their share of brutality and atrocities on THEIR enemy, the loyalist Kaddafi forces. Certain things this nation cannot control and that is the reaction of human beings and natural disasters. So the nation accommodates as it sees fit.
This latest presidential speech is not for the invasion of Iran ... yet. Soon it may be. This is the price of empire and hegemony and it will spell bankruptcy sometime soon! If radiation from the soon-to-be-greatest nuclear plant catastrophe on planet earth does not get North America courtesy of Japan than the economics of perpetual war with its hefty price tag will. If only our government, for once, would tell the truth. I could take it -- really I could!
