With the big 9/11 congressional investigation going on, the news is now
all about how 9/11 might have been averted through better intelligence
gathering and preparedness. But nobody is looking at the policies that,
over decades of time, planted the seeds, fertilized the seedbed,
cultivated the crop, and finally brought forth an inevitable harvest of
hatred for America. That which has resulted in us being considered the
Great Satan to a significant segment of the population in an area that has
become vital to American interests. 9/11 was an outbreak of a disease that
had been incubating for many years. Indeed, it is a wonder that the
symptoms were never officially noticed, much less diagnosed and treated.
And it's a wonder that the acute outbreak took so long in coming.
Rather than attacking the disease at any time during its formative stages,
we've only lamented the recurrent and increasingly obvious symptoms of
hatred of America among Arab peoples. Then, when the acute 9/11 attack
occurred, we finally struck out savagely at one of the festering
manifestations of the symptoms. And then we went the extra mile to attack
Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11, and had never seriously posed a
threat to us), just in case it might be a future festering manifestations
of the symptoms. Iraq, of course, was an enemy primarily because we had
continued to be at war with it since the first Gulf War -- a period of
over a decade of debilitating economic sanctions and intermittent bombing.
More importantly, Iraq was an enemy because it was perceived as a serious
and potentially growing threat to Israel.
So now we are in Iraq for better or worse. And it looks worse all the
time.
Bush promises to turn sovereignty over to an Iraqi government on schedule,
regardless of the lack of any united front in that still deteriorating
nation. He also promises to stay the course militarily, even though the
going is getting tougher despite the fact that victory was declared a year
ago. It's beginning to appear that it took a man like Saddam Hussein to
successfully rule Iraq, but no viable replacement appears to be in sight.
We've apparently managed to cobble together a disjointed Iraqi committee,
and called it the beginnings of a democratic government, but it is
unlikely to actually rule Iraq and bring order out of increasing chaos.
But the president insists there's light, freedom, and democracy, at the
end of the tunnel in Iraq. All Pridger can say is good luck.
With what appears to be a deteriorating military situation in Iraq, our
position is beginning to resemble Israel's situation in the occupied
Territories. But what else could be expected when we appear, at least to
Arabs, to acting as Israel's proxy in Arab lands? A pattern of Iraqi
insurgent actions, followed by retaliatory reactions of escalating
ferocity, can do nothing but increase resentment and resistance to our
occupation. As our responses unavoidably kill and wound more innocents
than guilty parties, the Iraqi's cannot be expected to feel a great deal
of enthusiasm for our occupation. When mosques are bombed to root out
rebels, the assault becomes one against all Moslems -- at least that's how
it will be characterized by many Iraqis and most of the Moslem world.
And to think, a small band of box cutter wielding hijackers, under the
direction of a robed Moslem fanatic and a rag-tag terrorist organization
without a country, has brought us to this impasse. Box cutters! It's still
a little difficult to believe. And here we were worrying about apparently
non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The Bush administration was sure that Saddam had'em. He's used them on his
own people. Dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, of people died because of
those weapons of mass destruction. We, along with the Russians, had done
all we could to arm Iraq to the teeth with everything it needed -- those
WMDs had to be there. Saddam had gassed some of his own enemies with them.
But apparently Saddam got rid of them like we told him to.
Now it's a little embarrassing to have initiated a major preemptive war
(something that was totally un-American, and against all the tenets of
international law that we have been trying to foist upon the world for
nearly a century), on faulty assumptions. Was this due to a break-down in
intelligence service data gathering, or merely the result of a breakdown
in the intelligence levels of our elected and unelected officials in
Washington? Whatever it was, it certainly makes the president look bad,
and it makes our country look like the rogue state that we like to accuse
other nations of being. It won't be easy to live down. In fact, the world
has changed and America has lost the respect of most of the world.
Well, maybe that's an unfair assessment. Fear is a form of respect, and
the rest of the world has come to consider us as a highly dangerous
superpower.
Now even the Russians pulling their people out of Iraq. The new democracy
is simply getting a little too dangerous for them. Others will follow. The
New World Order is changing too, and gas prices are going out of sight at
American gas pumps. If we can just keep Red China on our side, and refrain
from going after North Korea's weapons of mass destruction, maybe WalMart
and Wall Street will hold up for a while longer.
We aren't hearing much about "body counts" in our present war.
That was the great gauge of our successes in Vietnam. If non-American body
counts were high, we knew we were winning and that there was light at the
end of the tunnel.
It would really be nice to know what the body count really is in Iraq
since we started the war. How much human collateral damage has really been
done? We only hear of our own casualties, and that more insurgents are
being killed than Americans. But how many innocent people have been killed
or maimed since we went in to save the Iraqi people?
Pridger wonders how our body count would compare to that of the former
Butcher of Baghdad? Chances are, we've already outdone Saddam hands down.
In our eagerness to make America secure by saving the Iraqi people, we've
inadvertently swapped roles. All good intentions aside, we're failing to
win the hearts and minds of the survivors.
Salvation, of course, is dangerous business and collateral damage cannot
be avoided. Doing God's work is thus a thankless task. The Iraqis seem to
be less and less appreciative of the salvation we've delivered as time
goes on. We claim that most Iraqis are glad to be rid of Saddam, but now
they are much more eager to be rid of our occupying forces than they ever
were to overthrow the Butcher of Baghdad.
This bodes ill for our nation building in the Iraqi, as our
"success" is looking less and less successful at winning the
love and respect of the Iraqi citizens. It also bodes ill for a Bush
reelection in November, giving John Kerry and the Democrats plenty of
ammunition to attack Bush's war and nation building record.
All of this might have been foreseen by even the most detached observer
since well before the beginning. But Bush had a mission. Unfortunately we
have lost most of the international sympathy we initially had as the
result of 9/11, and most of the world considers our Iraqi War a colossal
blunder, if not the criminal act of a superpower rogue state. Sooner or
later our coalition allies will be seeking to disassociate themselves from
our nation-building effort, as Spain is threatening to do. Tony Blair of
England is probably on the way out in that country, and if the English
pull out of Iraq, we'll be left to cope with the mess we've created
virtually alone. This is a tragedy of momentous proportions for America's
apparent foreign policy goals. And it doesn't bode well for the New World
Order and globalism either.
The New World Order is dead without the unmitigated support and leadership
of the United States. But if America is considered a superpower pariah and
rogue state by the rest of the world, who's going to continue to follow
such a leader without dragging their feet a little?
But what are the choices? Can the rest of the world somehow invigorate and
empower the United Nations to take the lead in the world? No, the New
World Order cannot be guided by a big, sprawling, parliamentary committee
like the United Nations. Try as it might, the international community
cannot make the United Nations a world leader. It's an impossibility. As
much international regulatory power as the United Nations and its
multitudes of regulatory agencies have been given, it totally lacks
anything like cohesive leadership capabilities. Though it was born as the
supposed embryo of World governance, it has never matured into anything
but a much bigger embryo with mega tons of bureaucratic regulatory power.
Without United States' leadership, however, the UN would have been an
abortion, pure and simple (like the League of Nations before it). In any
case, where would the United Nations be without American financial
support?
Frantic attempts will be made to keep globalism on track, of course, and
the United States will do whatever it thinks necessary to maintain its
leadership role in the world. The world's only remaining superpower could
be expected to do no less.
It's increasingly appearing that the next presidential administration is
going to give the left hand of government (the Democrats), the job of
trying to salvage the New World Order. It will also have to try to salvage
something out of what is increasingly viewed as our Iraqi misadventure.
The left hand of government, of course, is comprised of "Global
Village" people who have a general disdain for any sort of
"nationalism" or patriotism. Appeasement both in Iraq and among
the global community can be expected to be their main mode of operation.
They will seek to hand our Iraqi problem off to the United Nations, with
the American taxpayer footing most of the bill for whatever comes to pass
in that region. Of course, they will want to do all within their powers to
empower and help focus that august body, and further subvert American
sovereignty in the spirit of international cooperation.
Unfortunately, the choices the American people have in national leadership
today (right hand or left hand of government), are choices between the
lesser of two or more possible disastrous scenarios. There are nothing but
disastrous scenarios out there on the table.
Not that Pridger is a pessimist or anything. Everything will work out in
the end. Trouble is, the end may not be where we wanted to go. But the
survivors will make do, and Pridger has no doubt that there will be many
survivors.
Pridger firmly believes that the American government should have
concentrated on making a better America for Americans rather than a better
world for everybody else. If we had our act together, maybe we could have
had a much more positive effect on the rest of the world. What we are
managing to do is to destroy ourselves in an effort of build an unworkable
New World Order based on a usurious global financial system and corporate
power, masquerading as a "global free market system," backed up
by military might.
If this really was a "Nation Under God" (maybe with a New
Testament Christian president, rather than an Old Testament Christian
president -- or, better yet, a Thomas Jefferson), we wouldn't be in Iraq.
We'd be right here at home making this land of milk and honey an even
better place. As it is, we're "over there" bringing democracy to
the heathens with eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth diplomacy,
efficiency, and determination, worthy of God's Chosen People taking
possession of the Promised Land.