Why Is Bush Out-Of-Step With The World?
It strikes me as odd that President George W. Bush is determined to do something so contrary to American heritage.
What Bush wants to do is strongly opposed by literally everybody in the world (except Tony Blair of England).
Bush wants to do something an estimated half of the people in the United States (the ones who think) and most of the British
people don't want us to do.
Our president wants to use the might of the most powerful military machine in the world to invade a small Middle
Eastern country that can't fight back.
He wants to commit the very same act of aggression against Iraq that Iraq committed against Kuwait in 1990. At
that time, President Bush's father, President George H. Bush, brought forth an international assault force against that same
little country. It was no contest then, and probably will be no contest this time either.
So why do it?
Bush and some members of his staff are trying to convince us that the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, has a
cache of "weapons of mass destruction" and that he is a threat to world peace. Yet Hussein and his leaders deny this. A team
of United Nations weapons inspectors have been searching Iraq now for months without finding any evidence of such weapons.
Failure to find evidence to support the Bush allegation has caused the other nations of the world, including
the United Nations as a whole, to reject any notion of invading Iraq with military force. They do not agree with Bush that
such action is needed.
France and Germany, countries that know well the horrors of war on the home turf, have led the resistance. Now
Russia and China have joined in a growing call for reason.
Bush appears so adamant about attacking Iraq and "killing" Hussein that he has alarmed a coalition of six Congressmen
to the point of going to court to try to stop him.
The Democratic House members, John Conyers of Michigan, Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, James McDermott of Washington,
Jose Serrano of New York, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois, want to prevent President Bush from
going to war against Iraq without first getting congressional approval.
They claim that under the terms of the U. S. Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war against
another country.
What is even spookier about the Bush plan is that people like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other
military leaders are suggesting a terror bombing assault designed to flatten the Capital City of Baghdad within minutes. There
is talk of a plan to kill Hussein within 48 hours and take over the country. Bush has even suggested that Nuclear weapons
may be used, if necessary, against the ragtag Iraqi Army.
Are Bush, Rumsfeld and the other advisors around them crazy? Is there something very sinister going on in
Iraq that the rest of us don't see? There are a lot of innocent people living in that country who stand directly in harms
way.
From my perspective, in an armchair and watching the national hysteria over "would-be" terrorist attacks that
don't happen, and listening to the propaganda machine cranked by the national news media, I fail to find evidence that America
needs to declare war against anybody.
If we do it, America will be guilty of criminal aggression. It would be the very crime that we have been sending
soldiers overseas to fight against for the last 100 years. A lot of old veterans in the United States understand this and
they are speaking out. If you don't believe me, start surfing the web and look for what they have to say. You will find their
remarks in the underground press because the formal American media is flying blind these days.
If anything, I think America needs to be paying close attention to the starving people of North Korea. This is
a country in desperate straits, where people are forced to join dictator Kim Chong-il's million-member army so they can be
assured of getting food. If the United States doesn't do something to ease the pain going on there, we could, indeed, find
ourselves at war in the Far East.
And Kim Chong-il DOES have weapons of mass destruction. He boasts that he has long-range missiles, capable of
reaching the United States, and nuclear payloads to send with them.
Now THAT is a threat. And if Mr. Bush doesn't turn his energies to resolving that growing world problem
very soon, I have no doubt that we will all pay the consequences. When people are starving, they are capable of doing drastic
things. Right now the North Koreans have nothing to lose.
