April, 2004, Week 3
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April, 2004, Week 3
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Monday April 12 , 2004 There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is rapture in the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but nature more. Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824) "B" and Cindy are home for Spring Break, Mike is still at Marks. Christy and I took them to FunLand and dropped them off. We went to eat at the Blue Koi in Palmdale and went shopping, Christy bought a shed and some more floor for the kitchen... I worked in the shed... got madder and madder,,, I am missing so many tools it makes me sick to my stomach... Tuesday April 13 , 2004 In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. Charles de Gaulle I got an e-mail last night that my Aunt Buddy (Emily) passes away on the 5th... 7 days ago, the funeral was on the 8th, I wonder why they don't communicate with us... I wonder if Uncle Bob has heard.` We can't keep on going the way we have been, the kids need to help around the house more... we spend most of our time just trying to stay ahead of the clutter, trying to do drywall and lay floor and replace ceiling tiles while shuffling kids to school and the doctor and therapy and the dentist and on and on. I feel guilty spending time on the PC when there is so much to be done but at the same time I feel somewhat justified in a spiteful sort of way. I read several articles this morning, mostly OP-ED pieces... I tend to gravitate toward people with opinions that parallel mine... like we all do. It would be easier if I was focusing on the Rush Limbaugh's and Ann Coulters of the world. they are easy to despise because they are so polarizing. they are caricatures, the extreme, Looking at the world through the eyes of extremists is to relegate the world to some sort of Tom and Jerry cartoon. It's the political equivalent of the thinking that our society is like KKK vs the Hari Krishna sect's. The world and it's politics should not be about good and evil... evil is just a matter of perspective, It should be about understanding, compassion and justice. There is a segment of our society that sees the world: Those supporting America - Good Those apposed to America - Evil What total bullshit, "bottom line thinking" like that is evil. What pleases me is Good, What displeases me is Evil. What preposterous arrogance. Is it possible that exploiting cheap labor in foreign countries might make folks upset? Is it possible that invading foreign countries unilaterally may create a little antagonism from the people who live there. Is it possible that inflicting Christianity on Muslims might be received as well as someone inflicting Islam on Baptists. Is it possible that imposing our will on people around the world might be looked upon as arrogant and be resented. Has anyone made not of the fact that Mel Gibson's "Passion of Christ" in all it's profession of "reality" cast a white man as Jesus Christ. I got news for ol' Mel, Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. I wonder when it is going to dawn on the Christian world that no new Crusade is going to change the fact that killing in the name of justice is a wee bit hypocritical. Killing to free the people, killing to liberate, oppression is freedom. Vengeance... according to the Christianity I was taught was supposed to be left to God... the same for retribution. George Bush has taken it upon himself to rid the world of "Evildoers". Only George and his little band of Zealots get to decide who the "Evildoers" are, and they alone pose as the instruments of God. Just as an aside, doesn't it bother anyone but me that all of this administration's Evildoers have oil? Wednesday April 14 , 2004 The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts. Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797) The floor is down in the dining room, only the kitchen to go... I still need to tape and paint the walls, and the ceiling in the dining room needs to be replaced... and the ceiling in the livingroom needs painting. I rode down to Canyon Country to attend the "Volunteer Appreciation Dinner" I did everything correctly except I showed up a week early... I feel like an idiot. We have a 'situation' with "B" and Mike. Probably not appropriate to speak about it here... so I won't. It is just taking a lot my attention lately... Thursday April 15 , 2004 Don't believe everything you think. I am going to make this line [Don't believe everything you think] my tag-line for a while... Just because you believe a thing doesn't make it so... it's a hard truth. Oh to be like Bush and have nothing to regret, no mistakes, no errors in judgment. I wonder what his world might be like... burrrr scary thought... no thanks. Today is all screwed up, kids, Doctor Appointments, Kids, Optometrists, and Kids. I tried to get some work done but events conspired to I am going to my ship's reunion next month, I am looking forward to it... I am not looking forward to biting my tongue. Some of the old(er) guys still talk about Jap's, Chink's and Gook's, they are the only enemy's they know, they don't like Arabs (An Arab is anyone from the Middle East or anyone who looks like they are from the Middle East which includes Pakistanis and Indians either, they don't like foreigners at all) but they don't know why... they vote Republican and talk about God but they don't know why they vote Republican, I get answers like, "I always vote Republican." and "George Bush is a 'Good Christian'." and they don't actually go to church and most can't answer the most basic questions about their professed religion... I get e-mails from guys that are chain letter type, pass this on if you believe in Jesus, or if you believe in America, or if you support our troups. The implication being that if you don't pass on their simplistic, mean spirited gibberish you must be a Satanist, Commie, who don't care about our soldiers and sailors... it takes a lot of willpower to hit the delete button and not the reply button. Some of the folks are pretty sharp, (ie. they agree with me) and some just don't give a damn about anything except their next drink or their next meal. I have one old friend from my Navy days, Orvile Williams, he's from Iowa... He plays Iowa Redneck with a commendable flair but he is a good hearted man and an honest one too. I would hate for the friendship to end. Great Bumper Sticker: Watch out for the idiot behind me. It's better than the one I wanted to make stating: "You are the idiot in front of the car behind you" Friday April 16 , 2004 Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955) The floor is done except for the back hall, We called a plumber out to replace the faucet in the kitchen sink and to fix a leak in the kids bathroom... what a rip-off. I am sure he charged the going rate but... Damn... Christy took "B", Cindy, Christian and Monica to the Rebok outlet store, she got about $350. worth of shoes for $180... not bad. I took Miss Calie 'Persnickety' Daggett out to buy a Swimsuit, we took Autumn 'My-way-or-the-highway' Daggett too... what a tedious affair. We got the suit and some shorts and a top to cover it up... Autumn had to do everything Calie did...
My reply:
Saturday April 17 , 2004
Interesting review of Bob Woodward's book, click on BWII in the header. Christian, Calie and Monica went to Newbury Park for a special weekend at the Adventist High School... it looks like Christian and Calie will be going there, Christian will go next year and Calie two years after, Not sure about Monica. I sort of don't mind, they like school and are doing well. Christian may be able to go on to college... Calie too I hope, she works hard for her grades, hard work should be rewarded. Sunday April 18 , 2004 The highest exercise of charity is charity towards the uncharitable. J.S. Buckminster, clergyman and editor (1797-1812) Water ran out again... Christy filled a pot to make macaroni and when she went to rinse it out... it was empty. The relay at the top of the tank is defective... I thought we could make it for a while without replacing it but I can't remember to keep checking the tank so I guess we have to do it... I will call in the AM. I watched Kerry on Tim Russart's show... he needs to start completing sentences, I can get the drift of what he is saying but sometimes he is hard to follow, He is in such a rush to answer the questions that his thoughts all rush to his mouth too quick... I can empathize with that... He seems to do well when he is prepared for the question but tends to sound a bit
Some of what I have read this week... "..I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators." Cheney
A Justice's Sense of Privilege
By BOB HERBERT Published: April 12, 2004 Antoinette Konz is a young education reporter for The Hattiesburg American, a daily newspaper with a circulation of about 25,000 in Hattiesburg, Miss. Ms. Konz, 25, has only been in the business for a couple of years, so her outlook hasn't been soiled by the cranks and the criminals, and the pretzel-shaped politicians that so many of us have been covering for too many years to count. She considered it a big deal when one of the schools on her beat, the Presbyterian Christian High School, invited her to cover a speech that was delivered last Wednesday by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. About 300 people, many of them students, filled the school's gymnasium for the speech. They greeted Justice Scalia with a standing ovation. Ms. Konz and a reporter for The Associated Press, Denise Grones, were seated in the front row. They began to take notes. And when Justice Scalia began speaking, they clicked on their tape recorders. What's important about this story is that Justice Scalia is a big shot. Not only is he a member in good standing of the nation's most august court, he's almost always among those mentioned as a possible future chief justice. Compared with him, Ms. Konz and Ms. Grones are nobodies. Justice Scalia, the big shot, does not like reporters to turn tape recorders on when he's talking, whether that action is protected by the Constitution of the United States or not. He doesn't like it. And he doesn't permit it. "Thirty-five minutes into the speech we were approached by a woman who identified herself as a deputy U.S. marshal," Ms. Konz told me in a telephone conversation on Friday. "She said that we should not be recording and that she needed to have our tapes." In the U.S., this is a no-no. Justice Scalia and his colleagues on the court are responsible for guaranteeing such safeguards against tyranny as freedom of the press. In fact, the speech Mr. Scalia was giving at the very moment the marshal moved against the two reporters was about the importance of the Constitution. Ms. Konz said neither she nor Ms. Grones wanted to comply with the marshal's demand. "It was very distracting, very embarrassing," she said. "We were still trying to listen to what he was saying." The marshal, Melanie Rube, insisted. The A.P. reporter tried to explain that she had a digital recording device, so there was no tape to give up. Ms. Konz said the deputy seemed baffled by that. Eventually both recordings were seized. If this had been an old-time Hollywood movie, the Supreme Court justice would have turned a kindly face toward the marshal and said, in an avuncular tone: "No, no. We don't do that sort of thing in this country. Please return the recordings." But this is the United States in the 21st century where the power brokers have gone mad. They've deluded themselves into thinking they're royalty, not public servants charged with protecting the rights and interests of the people. Both recordings were erased. Only then was the reporters' property returned. When agents acting on behalf of a Supreme Court justice can just snatch and destroy information collected by reporters, we haven't just thumbed our nose at the Constitution, we've taken a very dangerous step in a very ugly direction. The depot at the end of that dark road is totalitarianism. I called Jane Kirtley, a professor of media, ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, and asked her what was wrong with what the marshal did. She replied, "Everything." Not only was it an affront to the Constitution to seize and erase the recordings, Ms. Kirtley believes it was also a violation of the Privacy Protection Act, a law passed by Congress in 1980. "It protects journalists not just from newsroom searches," she said, "but from the seizure of their work product material, things like notes and drafts, and also what's called documentary materials, which are things like these tapes, or digital recordings." Ms. Konz told me: "All I was doing with that tape recorder was making sure that I was not going to misquote the justice. My only intention was to report his words accurately." After the encounter with the marshal, she said, "I went back to the office and I just felt absolutely — I just felt horrible." (Note: Saclia gave a tepid appology the following day... because of this article and others like it I imagine Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth (Add this to the article about the 15 year old girl who took nude pictures of herself and posted them on the internet, she was arrested for being a pornographer) and By MICHAEL CHABON Published: April 13, 2004 SAN FRANCISCO - Earlier this month my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reported that a college student had been expelled from art school here for submitting a story "rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust" to his creative writing class. The instructor, a poet named Jan Richman, subsequently found herself out of a job. The university chose not to explain its failure to renew Ms. Richman's contract, but she intimated that she was being punished for having set the tone for the class by assigning a well-regarded if disturbing short story by the MacArthur-winning novelist David Foster Wallace, "Girl with Curious Hair." Ms. Richman had been troubled enough by the student's work to report it to her superiors in the first place, in spite of the fact that it was not, according to the Chronicle, "the first serial-killer story she had read in her six semesters on the faculty at the Academy of Art University." Homicide inspectors were called in; a criminal profiler went to work on the student. The officers found no evidence of wrongdoing. The unnamed student had made no threat; his behavior was not considered suspicious. In the end, no criminal charges were brought. In this regard, the San Francisco case differs from other incidents in California, and around the country, in which students, unlucky enough to have as literary precursor the Columbine mass-murderer Dylan Klebold, have found themselves expelled, even prosecuted and convicted on criminal charges, because of the violence depicted in their stories and poems. The threat posed by these prosecutions to civil liberties, to the First Amendment rights of our young people, is grave enough. But as a writer, a parent and a former teenager, I see the workings of something more iniquitous: not merely the denial of teenagers' rights in the name of their own protection, but the denial of their humanity in the name of preserving their innocence. It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights. We justly celebrate the ideals enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but it is also a profoundly disillusioned document, in the best sense of that adjective. It stipulates all the worst impulses of humanity: toward repression, brutality, intolerance and fear. It couples an unbridled faith in the individual human being, redeemed time and again by his or her singular capacity for tenderness, pity and all the rest, with a profound disenchantment about groups of human beings acting as governments, court systems, armies, state religions and bureaucracies, unchecked by the sting of individual conscience and only belatedly if ever capable of anything resembling redemption. In this light the Bill of Rights can be read as a classic expression of the teenage spirit: a powerful imagination reacting to a history of overwhelming institutional repression, hypocrisy, chicanery and weakness. It is a document written by men who, like teenagers, knew their enemy intimately, and saw in themselves all the potential they possessed to one day become him. We tend to view idealism and cynicism as opposites, when in fact neither possesses any merit or power unless tempered by, fused with, the other. The Bill of Rights is the fruit of that kind of fusion; so is the teenage imagination. (Article) A 15-year-old Pittsburgh girl has been arrested for exploiting and abusing herself online. (Not my comments, but I concur) Score one for decency. Regardless of how you feel about pornography, age of consent laws, etc, you can probably agree that it's bad for young kids to be exploited and mistreated for the entertainment of, well, pretty much anyone else. For this reason, we have child pornography laws, which allegedly protect said kids from said abuse. Then we get stories like this one. For those of you too lazy to click on the link (as I normally would be), here's the summary - a 15-year-old girl, whose name has been withheld, has been distributing photos of herself "in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts" online. By some method they won't disclose, police found out about this girl, arrested her, and confiscated her computer. According to the article, she is being charged with "sexual abuse of children, possession of child pornography and dissemination of child pornography." Look at that first charge again. "Sexual abuse of children." A girl who is legally a child (and maybe mentally, although this is certainly up for debate) voluntarily took photos of herself doing things she did voluntarily, and which she presumably enjoyed, and distributed these photos for others to enjoy. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this does not quite fit the definition for "abuse." It certainly doesn't match any of the seven definitions given by the Oxford English Dictionary; the closest is "wrong or improper use, misuse, misapplication, perversion" (that's definition 2a, for those of you keeping track). As far as I can tell from the story, this girl felt that she was using her body correctly and properly, at least outside of the "polite society" type of proper. Maybe there was some "perversion" involved, but most of those are tolerated by American law, if not American society. As I mentioned above, child pornography laws exist to protect children who actually are in need of protection. This does not seem to be the case at all this time. If she's been raised properly, then at age 15 this girl should be at least somewhat capable of making mature decisions about sexuality. Why she made the decision to post pictures of herself online is anybody's guess at the moment, but it was her own decision about her own body, and she doesn't need any legislation "protecting" her from that. Hopefully she'll stand trial before a judge who has enough sense to dismiss this for not being within the spirit of the law, but the way things are going these days with all the Crusade for Decency, it's unlikely. And even if the trial does come out okay, Gorthak only knows what kind of reaction this is going to pull from her parents, school, and general community. In conclusion, yes, children need protection sometimes, but what they need more than that as they get older is an autonomy-supportive environment. Jailing them for being open about their sexuality, even if it's maybe a bit too open, isn't going to help anyone. Won't someone please think of the children??? By PAUL KRUGMAN In his Saturday radio address, George Bush described Iraqi insurgents as a "small faction." Meanwhile, people actually on the scene described a rebellion with widespread support. Isn't it amazing? A year after the occupation of Iraq began, Mr. Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever. Events should have cured the Bush team of its illusions. After all, before the invasion Tim Russert asked Dick Cheney about the possibility that we would be seen as conquerors, not liberators, and would be faced with "a long, costly and bloody battle." Mr. Cheney replied, "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators." Uh-huh. But Bush officials seem to have learned nothing. Consider, for example, the continuing favor shown to Ahmad Chalabi. Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave of U.P.I., however, administration officials gave him control of Saddam's secret files — a fine tool for blackmail — and are letting him influence the allocation of reconstruction contracts, a major source of kickbacks. And we keep repeating the same mistakes. The story behind last week's uprising by followers of Moktada al-Sadr bears a striking resemblance to the story of the wave of looting a year ago, after Baghdad fell. In both cases, officials were unprepared for an obvious risk. According to The Washington Post: "One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision [to close Sadr's newspaper] was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad." If we're lucky, the Sadrist uprising will eventually fade out, just as the postwar looting did; but the occupation's dwindling credibility has taken another huge blow. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, who once challenged his own father to go mano a mano, is still addicted to tough talk, and still personalizes everything. Again and again, administration officials have insisted that some particular evildoer is causing all our problems. Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam's sons were killed. In December, they predicted an end to the insurgency after capturing Saddam himself. Six weeks ago — was it only six weeks? — Al Qaeda was orchestrating the insurgency, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the root of all evil. The obvious point that we're facing widespread religious and nationalist
resentment in Iraq, which is exploited but not caused by the bad guy du jour, never seems to sink in. And now we have a new villain. Yesterday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez declared that "the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moktada al-Sadr." If and when they do, we'll hear once again that we've turned the corner. Does anyone believe it? When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course. The best we can realistically hope for now is to turn power over to relatively moderate Iraqis with a real base of popular support. Yes, that mainly means Islamic clerics. The architects of the war will complain bitterly, and claim that we could have achieved far more. But they've been wrong about everything so far — and if we keep following their advice, Iraq really will turn into another Vietnam. Copyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2004 April 12, 2004 NEW YORK — How the many intelligent people in the Bush Administration can continue to make so many enormous blunders astounds and dismays. Two examples: Australia is facing a tight electoral race between conservative John Howard, who eagerly sent troops to Iraq, and Labor Party challenger, Mark Latham, who, like Spain's new prime minister, vows to bring his nation's troops home from Iraq. A majority of Australians oppose the Iraq War. US ambassador Tom Schieffer, a Texas pal of George Bush, warned Australians of `serious consequences' if they elect Latham. Now, Australians love America, but any worldly person knows, do not threaten Aussies. They will come out swinging. Schieffer should be fired. Far worse, however, is the ham-handed US Iraq Proconsul, Paul Bremer. A neo-conservative ideologue, Bremer was responsible for two of the Bush Administration's most disastrous mistakes in Iraq: disbanding Iraq's Army, and firing tens of thousands of government bureaucrats because they were Ba'ath party members. Any junior imperialist knows the first thing you do when you conquer someone's country is to buy the loyalty of its existing armed forces, government and police. Otherwise you will have armies of angry, unemployed potential rebels roaming the streets — Iraq being Exhibit A. Bremer's third horrible blunder came this week. The US Proconsul, who is supposedly bringing the light of democracy to Iraq, shut down a tiny, 10,000 circulation Shia newspaper and arrested its editor for `spreading anti-American views' and calling Bremer rude names. The paper's publisher was firebrand Shia mullah Muqtada el-Sadr, who has been calling on Iraqis to resist US occupation. Bremer turned Sadr, a little-respected junior cleric with a limited following, into an overnight hero to restive Shias, and a new American villain. Bremer's latest imbecility caused Iraq's Shia majority, which was simmering with anti-American passions, to explode into violence. Washington and US forces were caught totally by surprise, though warnings were aplenty. This writer, for example, said on CNN's Paula Zahn show — exactly three days before the explosion of Shia rage — `the Shia and the US are on a collision course?their younger mullahs are calling for armed resistance?what we've seen so far(Sunni resistance) is only a foretaste of the violence to come.' For months, Iraq's Shia have heeded calls for patience from their spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He tried to get Washington to agree to genuine democratic elections in January, 2005. But it's painfully clear the US will not allow Iraq's Shia majority(60%) to gain real political power, and intends to keep troops based there indefinitely. The Bush Administration's definition of `democracy' in Iraq means a puppet regime that goes through the motions of democracy, `invites' US troops to stay on, permits US business to exploit Iraq's oil riches, and cooperates with Israel. An interesting side note: Reza Pahlavi, pretender to Iran's throne, opined to me recently in Washington that Iraq's Ayatollah Sistani actually outranks all of Iran's clergy, including leader, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, and Iraq's holy city of Najaf outranks Iran's theological center, Qum. Revelations of Washington's plans to colonize Iraq, and Israel's assassination of the Palestinian leader, Sheik Yassin, intensified pent-up Shia fury. Americans can thank Bremer and his bosses in the White House for opening this two-front war in Iraq and driving the Shia and Sunnis together. The savage punishment of the rebellious city of Falluja — over 300 Iraqis killed — after the brutal killing of four US mercenaries there sharply recalls Israel's ravaging of the rebellious West Bank town of Jenin. As this column predicted a year ago, `liberated' Iraq has become a copy of the strife-torn Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza — writ large. Israeli military and intelligence experts are now advising US operations in Iraq. All who oppose US occupation are branded `terrorists.' Iraq is not going to be `liberated' or taught democracy by means of US heavy tanks and helicopter gunships. Quite the contrary, what we have seen this week is the sowing by heavy-handed US occupation forces of a whole new crop of terrorist dragon's teeth in the bloodstained soil of Iraq. The only bright note for the Bush White House: if it can't kill Osama bin Laden in time for November elections, then maybe pesky Mullah Muqtada will do. ASHCROFT'S RECORD OF LYING TO CONGRESS ABOUT 9/11 With Attorney General John Ashcroft testifying before the 9/11 Commission today, a quick analysis of his previous statements shows he has repeatedly lied to Congress about the Bush Administration's counterterrorism record.Specifically, when questioned by Congress in 2002 about why he tried to de-prioritize and slash funding for counterterrorism before 9/11, Ashcroft resorted to dishonest denials -- even in the face of budget documents that proved he was not telling the truth. For instance, in testimony before the House of Representatives, Ashcroft said that before 9/11, his "number-one goal" at the Justice Department "was the prevention of terrorist acts" and that he immediately "began to shape the department and its efforts in that respect"
By Richard Cohen Thursday, April 15, 2004; Page A25 The term of the moment in Washington is "the wall." This is the legal barrier that once separated the CIA and its investigators from the FBI and its investigators, and which may have contributed to the confusion that enabled the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A more interesting wall, however, was on view Tuesday evening in President Bush's prime-time news conference. It's the one between him and reality. Never mind that even for Bush, this was a poor performance -- answers that resembled a frantic scavenger hunt for the right (or any) word or, too often, a thought. Never mind that he really had very little to say -- no exit plan for Iraq, no second thoughts about Sept. 11, no wonderment, even, at the apparent disappearance of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and how that might have happened. Like a kid who has been told otherwise, Bush persists in believing in his own version of Santa Claus. The weapons are there, somewhere -- in a North Pole of his mind. What matters more is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: "We're changing the world." He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq and he used it in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson, that presidential personification of naive morality, shake his head in bemusement. In Bush's rhetoric, a war to rid Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction, a war to ensure that Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" did not appear over an American city, has mutated into an effort to reorder the world. "I also know that there's an historic opportunity here to change the world," Bush said of the effort in Iraq. But the next sentence was even more disquieting. "And it's very important for the loved ones of our troops to understand that the mission is an important, vital mission for the security of America and for the ability to change the world for the better." It is one thing to die to defend your country. It is quite another to do that for a single man's impossible dream. What Bush wants is admirable. It is not, however, attainable. Shortly after Sept. 11, Bush used the word "crusade" to characterize his response to the attacks. The Islamic world, remembering countless crusades on behalf of Christianity, protested, and Bush quickly interred the word in the National Archives or someplace. Nonetheless, that is pretty much what Bush described in his news conference -- not a crusade for Christ and not one to oust the Muslims from Jerusalem but an American one that would eradicate terrorism and, in short, "change the world." The United States, the president said, had been "called" for that task. Some people might consider this religious drivel and others might find it stirring, but whatever it is, it cannot be the basis for foreign policy, not to mention a war. Yet it explains, as nothing else can, just why Bush is so adamantly steadfast about Iraq and why he simply asserts what is not proved or just plain untrue -- the purported connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, for instance, or why Hussein was such a threat, when we have it on the word of David Kay and countless weapons inspectors that he manifestly was not. Bush talks as if only an atheist would demand proof when faith alone more than suffices. He is America's own ayatollah. Several investigative commissions are now meeting in Washington, looking into intelligence failures -- everything from the failure to detect and intercept the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to the assertion that Iraq was armed to the teeth with all sorts of awful stuff. But what really has to be examined is how a single man, the president, took the nation and part of the world to war because, as he essentially put it Tuesday night, he was "called" to do it. If that is the case, and it sure seems so at the moment, then this commission has to ask us all -- and I don't exclude myself -- how much of Congress and the press went to war with an air of juvenile glee. The Commission on Credulous Stupidity may call me as its first witness, but after that it has to examine how, despite our vaunted separation of powers, a barely elected president opted for a war that need not have been fought. This is Bush's cause, a noble but irrational effort much like the one that set off for Jerusalem in the year 1212. It was known as the Children's Crusade. |
