The War Against America
Bush’s war against America.
The war he must win in order to win the 2004 election.
If Iraq goes according to plan (insert derisive snort here), the recycled IGC stooges we’ve foisted on the transitional government will keep the lid on until November. Our armed forces, disengaged from the futile, polarizing Fallujah and Najaf campaigns, will huddle in their bunkers and keep (reported) casualties to a minimum for the next few months.
Then once George is safely ensconced in the White House for another four years, Allawi can postpone elections, crush street protests, and/or get himself blown to kingdom come by a car bomb. Whatever.
And our army can continue its noble social experiment, that search for the Holy Grail of military occupation: finally finding the right mix of brutality, degradation, torture, subversion, and proxy-administered violence that can defeat a burgeoning counterinsurgency.
If Big Media cooperates, Iraq is off the front pages for now. (And we’re already helping. Every blogger who runs squealing after the Chalabi-gate Iran story is shifting attention from the victims of Abu Ghraib to the good-hearted, betrayed, and ravished American innocents who populate the government and media outposts of our war empire).
Karl Rove is striving to reposition the election campaign and swap his tarnished candidate The Dingbat of Iraq for the Tele-prompter ready Commander of the War on Terror (whose main accomplishment to date has been having the World Trade Center knocked down on his watch; well, never mind).
He needs the War on Terror to come home again.
And now its time for John Ashcroft, the brutal, simple-minded Zhukov of Bush’s re-election war, to direct the decisive battle.
No ideological frou-frou or intellectual jiu-jitsu for hard-working John Ashcroft, his forehead glistening with righteous sweat and anointing Crisco.
No fine words or dishonest deeds promising to make the world a better place.
Just brutal, destructive, meat-headed partisanship.
The most overt recent case was Ashcroft’s unilateral declaration of a terror emergency — a warning that the Department of Homeland Security did not find fit to endorse.
The other, developing case has been the sleazy whispering campaign that al Qaeda might try to influence the U.S. election i.e. defeat Bush and bomb Kerry into the presidency with a summer terrorist attack “like they did in Spain”.
It reached its current apogee with the now notorious segment by Kelli Arena, the CNN Justice Department correspondent, extracting from her panel of experts the speculation that al Qaeda would welcome a Kerry victory over Bush as the surest way to victory in Iraq.
That’s nonsense, or course.
The unfolding disaster in Iraq will continue whether or not cautious Kerry or stupid George is reviewing the shrinking list of viable, decent options we have over there. If anything, the nations of the world will be more likely to respond to Kerry’s appeal for assistance on Iraq than reward Bush’s non-stop campaign of lies, intimidation, and fraud in the Middle East.
Al Qaeda might indeed welcome a Kerry victory: certainly Osama bin Laden will be snickering during his dialysis session if our self-styled Generalissimo of the War on Terra gets the boot from a disgusted American electorate.
But Osama will just have to take his place in a long, long line as the rest of the world hails the departure of our overmatched, in denial Caligula from the world stage.
Never mind the fact that Ashcroft is using the terrorists to try and do something we swore we would never let the terrorists do: modify our behavior to the point of influencing a national election.
We’re steamed because Ashcroft is trying to equate a vote for Kerry with cowardice and appeasement.
Them’s fightin’ words, podnah!
And he’s not just smearing Democrats.
Ashcroft is smearing the majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, who know that Bush has put our country on the wrong track.
I don’t think anybody outside of the self-interested and self-deluded Bush bloc feels a fight and another national crisis over George W. Bush is worth it.
Bush already messed up our democracy with the contested 2000 election. He messed up our national interests and honor with an utterly misguided and mismanaged war in Iraq.
Now Ashcroft wants to try to turn this election into a choice between George W. Bush and terror and rip open the wounds between right and left…
…just so Bush can get bailed out of another failure.
It’s not 2000 - or 2002 - any more.
After years of ignorance, deceit, denial, and incompetence masquerading as moral clarity, the American electorate no longer wants its national self-respect held hostage to George W. Bush.
When we go into a voting booth, we don’t want to be faced with the accusation that we are participating in a terrorist victory by pulling the lever (or anxiously fingering a Diebold touchscreen) against a demonstrated incompetent.
No, it might be better to try to kill John Kerry with kindness (and voters with boredom) with a low-key issue campaign, instead of trying to demonize him and his supporters and sympathizers as the al Qaeda ticket.
But with the combination of desperation and tin-eared megalomania that has characterized the Bush gang in the last two years, the Ashcroft and the Bush team will blunder right ahead and conduct the only kind of campaign they seem to know: total war.
They will use the rhetoric and, perhaps, in the streets at the Republican Convention in New York, the tactics of war to enflame popular emotions, remove the middle ground of reasoned debate, and seek to marginalize and isolate their opponents.
But there’s a difference this time.
Today, Bush’s war is against the majority of Americans ready to turn away from Bush and his failures.
Bush’s war is a war…against America.
Not very patriotic is it?
There’s worse things than having a purported tax and spend Massachusetts liberal in the White House.
And one of them is having a selfish cabal seeking to polarize the electorate with hate and fear and divide this country against itself so an incompetent hack can gain another four undeserved years in office.
And there are more important things than having George W. Bush as president.
The list includes patriotism, national unity, dignity, and honor.
And peace.
We’ve got enough wars already.
We don’t need a civil war.
We don’t need John Ashcroft.
And we certainly don’t need someone whose remedy for a failed war in Iraq is a political and social war within the United States.
Go in peace, George W. Bush.
Just go.
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
