WHAT RIGHT DOES President Bush have to push so hard for war?
It was bad enough that Bill Clinton put America in the position of playing the world’s policeman, but now George W. Bush, a man who signed up for military service and then went AWOL, is leading us into war. Personally, I think that Bush’s tough talk on Iraq is pretty rich coming from someone who dropped out of the National Guard, then pulled some strings to avoid being nailed for it.
He is trying to sustain a moral authority that no one should have granted him in the first place. In a time of war, we hand people authority because a strong leader is necessary for national unity. To sustain that authority Bush is preparing to launch us into perpetual war.
Bush and most of Congress are gallivanting around the world erecting fledgling democracies, scolding dictators, and using the phrase “axis of evil” to analogize Iraq, Iran and North Korea with World War II axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy, in an attempt to convince us of the urgent need to fight a war. But is this war the most important concern of America?
While the Taliban aided and abetted Osama Bin Laden and his lackeys immediately after Sept. 11, it’s been 10 years since the first war with Iraq, and aside from the occasional SCUD missile unsuccessfully fired at a U.S. warplane, we haven’t heard a peep from Iraq.
Nothing short of a ground invasion is going to topple Saddam and we need soldiers for that. The worst part of the whole mess is that Bush, who was either too frightened or too well connected to serve in Vietnam and risk his life, is now only a few months away from risking the lives of a lot of American soldiers.
Why go into Iraq anyway? The country isn’t a haven for Al Queda; it is a secular dictatorship, not an Islamic theocracy. There are countless countries in violation of United Nations resolutions, and many are developing weapons of mass destruction. Countries all over the world harbor terrorists as well.
Even the question of whether or not Saddam has weapons of mass destruction is unresolved. The UN weapons inspection team never found any weapons of mass-destruction despite years of searching.
The only justification for war with Iraq is the possibility that Saddam might pull something and, frankly, I don’t think he is suicidal. I understand that we can’t be sure that he won’t do something drastic to attack the United States, but an unprovoked attack against another country, whether by Iraq or by the United States, no matter how well intentioned, is not a defense of democracy or justice.
