The following is an essay I wrote for submission to a couple of liberal media sites. They were looking for writers and I was hoping to get a job with one or the other.
Debunking Republican Rhetoric: Counterarguments to the war.
Just about anybody on earth could tell you the single biggest news story lately. America went to war with Iraq. Some of us have a good idea of the specifics, but many of us are holding onto illusions propagated by Bush and his cronies. Everywhere I go when the war comes up I inevitably get into an argument with some right-winger who thinks he has got a handle on what is going on.
After hearing each and every argument in favor of the war over and over again (there are only a few after all) I have decided to make a list of the most common and explain why they just do not work. This way, if you happen upon these people, you too can shoot down their bad logic.
1) Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are slightly differing views on this one. Some will say he had the potential to get them, or he was looking into developing them and these things are bad enough. Others say he had them and got rid of them before we got there, and some of the more naive will say they are still too well hidden and we are bound to find them any day now. Donald Rumsfeld himself pointed out that we know he had them and used them on his own people and neighboring countries.
Right off, the "potential" threat argument scares me. That means our new international policy is if we have reason to believe your country could be a threat, you are toast. With this new precedent we could go to war with any nation at any given time provided the administration felt a "potential" threat.
Secondly, in that aforementioned interview Rumsfeld was also forced to concede to his interviewer that we knew that was happening more than ten years ago, and we know it hasn't happened since then. We effectively spanked Saddam back in Desert Storm, and after a losing war and being slapped with so many sanctions we effectively crippled him.
2) We needed to remove a corrupt regime. Saddam had a record for murder and torture, and he needed to be removed from power. My own father will concede that the war was sold to us with lies, but he still thinks it was worth it to remove Saddam.
The people that spew this one at you are apparently still holding on to all that early 1990's propaganda from Daddy Bush's war, and I'm sure that's just what Bush Jr and his crew were banking on. Saddam has been on a leash for about a decade now. Still a bulldog, yes, but safely muzzled and caged.
But, okay, just for the sake of discussion, let's say it is our responsibility to right all the world's wrongs. We are after all the world's biggest superpower, right? So why didn't we do anything about Rwanda in 1994? 800,000 people were slaughtered in about three months in Rwanda, and did we lift a finger? Have we lifted a finger since? Nope. There are many more examples, but this one seems compelling enough, doesn't it?
3) Iraq was in league with Al Qaida. Some people bought into the "my enemy's enemy is my friend" propaganda of the relationship between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden.
There is only one minor hole in that theory. Osama Bin Laden is Muslim, and therefore his way of life is theocracy. The religion of Islam (at least the sect practiced by Bin Laden and his followers) is everything. It is church AND state, and governs all aspects of one's life. There is no separation. Now, Saddam is a secular leader. A secular dictator, to be more specific. His word and deed are law, and no religion will interfere with him. Each side is anathema to the other, so if these two enemies of the United States did join forces to take on their common foe they would have to put aside ALL of their principals and ideologies. They hate each other for the same reasons they hate us, so to put those reasons aside doesn't make sense at all.
4) We don't have all the facts, the President does. People have actually said to me that there must be something the administration cannot tell us. Some secret bit of intelligence that they had that would compromise something or someone.
Okay… hmmm. I kind of understand the logic. They tell us on national TV something sensitive, and it gets leaked out onto international airwaves and something gets given away. It's actually nothing new from our government. We know now that during Desert Storm they fed false information to the major news sources. They used CNN like a weapon, because they knew the enemy was watching. Pretty clever, actually, but I can't help feeling betrayed.
The problem is the war is now over. We won. If there were some critical piece of info that could have blown things for us, don't you think it would be safe by now? Instead of giving us a whole new string of lies, that contradict the old lies, why not give us the truth now?
So there you have it. Next time you are at a dinner party and some self-righteous Bush-ite starts justifying this horrifying charade, you can efficiently put him in his place. Have fun and try not to look to smug when your target starts stuttering and saying "...um..." a lot.
Copyright 2004 Joseph Moore
knucklehead03@yahoo.com
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