Flavor of the Month

Okay...I'm back.  I just have to take advantage of some of the opportunities the news is giving me these days...

From another AOL news story-

"Bush expressed his condolences for the deaths. 'The story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people. I understand that. It is the long-term objective that is vital - that is to spread freedom,' he told reporters."

First, the order went out to find a connection, however minute, between the Sadaam Hussein regime and Al Qaida, while the administration leaked all kinds of inferences about Sadaam’s link to terrorism.

But they never found that smoking gun, so the focus shifted to WMD. It suddenly became America’s job to enforce the post-Gulf War weapons ban in Iraq. While the administration leaked vague snippets of intelligence suggesting that Sadaam had WMD and they were pointed at us.

Well, after nearly two years of invasion, killing, and searching, somewhere on the back page of the newspaper a couple of months ago, it was conceded that Sadaam never had the WMD. That one was hardly a surprise. For all the claims of faulty intelligence, does anyone really believe that we would have sent our military to attack a regime that was confirmed to have "the bomb?" "Hey, this guy is hiding a nuclear weapon under his shirt…let’s see if we can get him to lob it at somebody!" I don’t think so…

In the interim, the Bush administration began to cover the Iraq invasion with its "war on terror" blanket. Bush had declared "Mission accomplished;" but for some reason, the Iraqis kept on fighting. Since we had defeated Sadaam, these continued attacks must be coming from…oh yeah! Terrorists! See? They were there all along!

Now, for some reason, the Bush administration is backing away from the "terrorist" rhetoric. I’m not sure why…it served them well during the election. All they had to do was stand up in frontof their carefully chosen audiences, and invoke flashbacks of the twin towers crumbling into smoldering rubble by saying there were terrorists in Iraq and we had taken the fight to them. Worked like a charm! The American people gobbled up that stinking fish as if it were the finest prime rib.

So now we have the "spreading freedom" rhetoric--the most high-handed and dangerous they have come up with yet. It’s suddenly our job to march across the globe and lovingly bestow our chosen form of government upon any nation whose regime we deem "repressive." Or invade and force it upon them if they prove resistant. Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t we involved in "police actions" in southeast Asia for thirty years to prevent China from carrying out a similar philosophy? Oh, that’s right…when China was doing it, they were making a bid for world domination, and we had to stop them.

The Bush administration has seized upon this new philosophy to try to reinvigorate the American public’s fervor for the war. They felt the "spreading freedom" banner was something that no self-respecting American could fail to rally behind. But, need they have bothered? The American people have, up until now, swallowed even the most transparent excuses that the administration has produced for the Iraq war. They want war. They want to be able to sit in the bleachers and scream while our military takes the fight all over the globe. It isn’t about suffering, and death, and wreaking havoc on the lives of innocent people. It’s about being able to wave our flags and holler for the home team. As long as we're not playing on our home field... 

"Spreading freedom." Likely the Iraqi people feel they’ve had something spread on them, but freedom isn't it.