Snohomish County opinion
Try telling the truth here, so we don't die over there
By Cameron Castle
Special to The Times
"WE are fighting them there, so we don't have to fight them here!"
There are two things inherently wrong with such statements.
One: They attacked us here, when George Bush was completely ignoring them. (See * below.) Two: This strategy implies that as long as we are willing to supply enough U.S. soldiers to walk the streets of Baghdad to get shot or blown up, we, here at home, can feel safe.
Both of those points make my mind want to blow up like a roadside bomb.
Glad to hear it. Now we don't feel so alone in our tendencies toward intra-cranial explosions.
I do not want to hear our president or any supporter say those words again. It is a made-up turn of phrase designed to repel reasonable discussion and energize the diminishing support group for this administration.
Here is the Bush administration's logic:
They are so busy killing our soldiers in Iraq that they just can't find the bandwidth in their delegation of assignments to attack an airport in America.
But, if we were to bring our troops home, they would then somehow follow them back to the U.S., make it through airport and homeland security en masse and, now that our soldiers are stationed back at home ... attack us.
With what man's Navy or Airforce does al Qaida intend to launch this scary invasion so they can kill us for our freedoms? Terrorism is nothing new. Certainly not to Europe, or even the U.S. What about the Unibomber, Oklahoma City, family planning clinics blown to smithereens by the same idiot that set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics and other fringy fruitcakes like him?
Why are we not more concerned about terrorist plotters at home, like the anthrax killer. The FBI sure dropped that case like a hot potato when it was confirmed that the anthrax came from our own bio-weapons lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Why? Why are we not just as concerned about the attempted assassination of some of the leadership of the House and Senate as we are about the events of 9/11.? Because the targets were Democrats?
The more one tries to extrapolate the logic of the initial sentence of this essay, the more ludicrous it sounds.
Yet, we continue to hear it.
That's how the truth finally catches up to a a hail storm of lies and betrayals. The lies become the fodder of late night talk shows comedy. They do sound ridiculous and the liars should be ridiculed until hell won't have it, if not simply strung up for treason.
It is like Dick Cheney harping about "the aluminum tubes for Saddam's nuclear centrifuge machine," months after anyone tuned in enough to be, let's say, awake, knew that was a preposterous and laughable attempt at fear-mongering.
Cheney and Bush count on people being stupid and not tuned in. They know their base well.
I found a muffler on the garage floor of my friend's garage. Even though it is not really a car muffler, I am sure that he is very close to creating a functioning 12-cylinder Jaguar XKE that he then is going to drive like crazy through the neighborhood, killing innocent children walking to school.
They say, "Fight them there, not here."
They say, "Aluminum tubes."
And the media play it, and enough people repeat it and believe it.
Somebody has to stand up in front of the camera and say, "What? What did you just say? That is ridiculous. That is the 20th time, Mr. Cheney, you have mentioned those tubes, and I am not going to allow you to say it again."
If you say something like that to Dick Cheney, you get arrested. It' s happened before. A man who simply and calmly said to Cheney that his Iraq policy was reprehensible, was arrested by the secret service, right in front of his 8 year old son, and held in jail for several hours. Had his mother not been found, the kid would have been sent to spend time with social services. He would have been in the system. Nevertheless, I would certainly give the old coot a piece of my mind, if I could ever find him. Which of his hidey holes is he in today?
Like in the movie "Network," the audience would cheer.
"We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore!"
The situation over in Iraq is a tangled mess that seems nearly impossible to solve. Bush and his advisers got us into this mess and I cannot believe that I heard him say that it is up to the next president to get us out.
Why the hell can't you believe it? Junior has left messes for others to clean up all of his life. I'm not a huge Hillary fan, but her campaign slogan should be, "It takes a real strong woman to clean up the messes of big boys."
But until that happens, we need to try to work through this nightmare in the most intelligent and strategic way possible. We need to create some stability in that country and we need to do it with the least loss of life.
We can't create stability in Iraq. The sooner we face that fact, the better. We are the major cause of the problem. We can't be the solution. We are in a no-win situation. The Iraqi people do not trust us, because the Bushies have lied to them and betrayed them for over a decade. They know that. We should realize it as well.
The current strategy seems to be simply, "If we kill enough of them, we will win."
The first step to finding an end to this war that George Bush chose to start is speaking honestly about it.
Yep. That means speaking honestly about the history of the conflicts in the middle east and Central Asia to which we have been a party. None of this happened in a vacuum.
Purposely deceptive statements, such as "Fight 'em over there, so we don't fight 'em over here," are more destructive than the bombs ripping through the non-reinforced floorboards of our Humvees.
(* Bush failed to meet with the head of counterterrorism between the time he took office and Sept. 10, 2001. His attorney general, John Ashcroft, presented him with the most important issues facing the country, daily. Terrorism was not on the list. Bush took the month of August 2001 off, after being on the job for only six months and 20 days, making it impossible to meet daily with the head of the CIA, something his predecessor did daily for eight years — terrorist threats being No. 1 on his administration's list of issues.)
He still doesn't give a flip about the people who actually attacked us 9/11, with or without inside help, (I'm betting on the former). Osama bin Laden and that idiot Egyptian Doc, who decided that blowing people up was better than healing, are freer that we are. Osama is probably dead by now, but even if the Bush regime knew that, it's doubtful they would make any announcement. It's hard to replace a millionaire bully-boy, religious nut-case, especially when another terrorist attack might be necessary to maintain power in the U.S.
Cameron Castle is a freelance writer from Snohomish. E-mail him at Ch.castle@verizon.net
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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