Can't Get Fooled Again

After 9/11 I was angry as most here were.  Although a lifelong anti-war liberal Democrat I took the attack by Al Qaeda and the horrific heap of metal and pile of bodies it left personally as if I, too, had lost a loved one in the attack.  It was exactly what Al Qaeda wanted us to feel -- anger.  My fury like so many others could not be quelled.

When W. Bush stood on the fresh pile of 9/11 rubble in New York and said

"I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

a cheer ran through me as if, since Vietnam, I never protested a war at all.  I wanted revenge and watched the explosions from my TV at work set up for that express purpose so that we could watch the US bomb Sadam Hussein and Iraq into oblivion.  It was as if I were watching a July 4th fireworks display.  No dead bodies from the bombing, of course, were shown but simply a night sky beautifully lit up like Francis Scott Key was sitting at Ft. McHenry writing the words to the Star Spangled Banner, our national Overture, written about our flag from afar during the 1812 War and British invasion.

We now know that the Bush/Cheney administration and all of its cronies took us to a hellish 13 year hardly short Iraq War based on lies. Sadam Hussein hated Al Qaeda which was not even in Iraq until AFTER the US invasion.  There were no WMD, the trumped-up lie that gave the necessary rationale for war the US could peddle to the UN.  We were NOT greeted as the liberators the Cons said we would be. 

The Cons conned us into a 5000+ American dead war because no one -- not the people, not the Congress, and surely not the media -- thought critically to ask the critical questions about the trillion buck war which was supposed to pay for itself but still in religious war form rages.  ISIS, the more brutal Al Qaeda offshoot, never there before is there now, and has become the latest rationale for war and perceived-by-us threat as it blasts its way toward a territorial huge Islamic caliphate. 

Again, we are being asked by our previously anti-war president to go back into a war we just left by first sending more planes to bomb and more advisers to advise failed states.  The only thing sure is more of us will die.

Are we not asking the hard questions again?  It seems not as the desire to bomb is now supported by 67% of the US population.  Sometimes there is no answer that will correct a problem. The cancer the president describes correctly is the nature of ISIS and it is exactly that -- a religious century’s long cancerous dispute that continues in a part of an Arab Spring world which looks nothing like spring and more like eternal war that will continue generationally.

Like some cancers sometimes one must face facts no matter how much one "fights" it will ultimately return.  And so it will be with ISIS; no matter how many are killed more will take their place.  Americans with their white hat black hat world view cannot understand that it is not as simple as kill the bad guys. The “bad guys" always return and worse the hats the Arabs see us wearing are colored black and used as proof the west wants to defeat Islam their sacred creed.  We cannot understand that because we are fed our own propaganda from a corporate media that slants its news to feed its hungry advertisers to get us to watch.

I am VERY skeptical of it all. I have been third degree burned once angered after 9/11 because I accepted W. Bush's horrific Iraq war based on lies. Now should I get burned again because explosive religious war bombasts decide to do what comes naturally to them and behead two journalists who took a huge reporting risk going to a tinderbox morass to report on a group that propagandizes them by killing them horrifically and placing it on YouTube?

America should think well on what it does before it becomes involved in an eternal generational conflict which will kill our own and sap whatever resources we have left. 

The Middle East we KNOW is about oil, the fuel of life.  We have needed desperately to get off it as an addict hooked on heroin needs to get clean.  Oil kills not only us in war but pollutes our earth we need to live destroying it through climate change and filth.  Alternative sources of energy must be developed quickly and oil ultimately ditched to get the Middle East heroin monkey off our backs.

Before we begin on our latest war venture as George Bush so in-eloquently put it:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

For once I agree!