Unwinnable war means hard times at home

Nov. 30, 2005

Comedian George Carlin offers the best reason yet for pulling out of Iraq: you just can‘t beat an endless stream of religious fanatics who have nothing to lose and are willing to die for their cause, even if it takes forever:
“... don‘t get all excited about this goofy idea, ‘the spread of democracy,’” Carlin writes in his new book. “No matter who the United States puts in charge to bring peace and order in Iraq or Palestine or anywhere else, those people will be killed. It’s that simple. Anyone who supports the United States will be killed. Peace and order will not be tolerated.”

Recently, Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa. came to a similar conclusion, noting in a speech that the war in Iraq isn’t going “as advertised” by the Bush administration. A 37-year veteran of the Marine Corps who served as a colonel in Vietnam, Murtha voted to authorize the war in 2002. Yet through a soldier’s eyes, Murtha saw the success of our cause slipping into chaos over the past two-and-a-half years.
That, along with weekly visits to wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. , convinced Murtha that our young people in Iraq are sitting ducks, waiting for the next fanatic‘s roadside bomb to go off. This from one of the war’s biggest supporters early on:

“It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion,” Murtha said of the war. “...The United States and Coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.”

Ten U.S. soldiers died in Iraq the following weekend in addition to 155 Iraqis and seven foreign soldiers. How many more will pass before we get a clue?
Also in the news the weekend before Thanksgiving was word of our downward spiral:
• 4,000 white collar workers to be laid off by Ford Motor Company.
• 40% of New Orleans still without power.
• 54,000 hurricane survivors still living in hotels and on cruise ships.
• GM to cut 30,000 jobs and close 12 assembly plants in three years.
Where will it end?
It’s an old story, that of layoffs in Michigan -- but this time there‘s less hope than ever of bouncing back due to global competition. With Michigan edging toward the highest unemployment in the nation, our situation is more dire than ever.
There’s an old saying that as goes General Motors, so goes the country. Could it be any more obvious in a war costing $2,000 per second that the wheels are falling off America itself as domestic problems go begging? Is it any more obvious that we need to focus on our problems right here in Michigan before we ourselves slip into chaos? What about the shocking poverty of Louisiana that the whole world saw on TV during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Hard times on the homefront.
Let’s do more to point out the obvious:
Vice President Dick Cheney said in March, 2003, that Americans would most likely be viewed as “liberators” by the Iraqi people. But that was before the news of torture at Abu Ghraib. Newsweek columnist Fareeed Zakaria notes that 63% of Iraqis supported the American occupation before the torture scandal. “A month after Abu Grahib, the number was 9 percent.”
That’s where we lost the war in Iraq: at the public relations battle of Abu Ghraib where not a single shot was fired.
How are you going to win a war on behalf of “democracy” when the whole world considers Dick Cheney to be our “Vice President for Torture“ for defending secret prisons and torture chambers for the CIA?
Currently, there are some 65 attacks each day against our troops, and it’s a far deadlier situation for the Iraqi people as the Shi’ites and Sunnis devolve into butchery.
Meanwhile, we’ve got nearly 60 million Americans without health insurance, pensions stripped at scores of companies, the Chinese eating our lunch, more hurricanes on the way due to global warming... and a captain who heads off to a fundraiser when the rudder falls off the ship.
It makes you wonder if the war has become America’s “hole in the dike.” In that story by Hans Christian Anderson, a little Dutch boy punches a hole in a dike to get a look at the other side. When seawater starts streaming through the hole, he uses his finger to plug the dike. But the hole grows larger and larger until the boy and his country are washed away.
That story is starting to sound eerily like a metaphor for America.