1 Boring Old Man

I caught pieces of McCain’s speech today. He said some good things. No torture, Geneva Conventions, having allies, partnering with South America, it’s a different world with many powers, global warming is a problem, There were snatches of traditional Conservativism, small government, fiscal responsibility, etc. I was involved with something else, so I mostly caught sound bytes. He’s not a particularly inspiring speaker, at least to my ear. He said "Islamic Jihadists" a few too many times for my tastes, but I’m so averse to Bush’s buzz words that it may have just been guilt by association. There was one thing he said that has stayed with me throughout the day. He was trying to find some place firm to stand about his support for the war. In the course of things, he said, "We owe it to the Iraqi people." That’s the line that stuck.

That’s a tough one for me. I opposed this war from the moment Bush mentioned it. Back then, I knew so little about things that my opposition was based not on the complexity of Shiite/Sunni relations, or oil reserves in Iraq. I objected in part because it sounded plenty fishy to me. We were attacked by Osama bin Laden, a rogue religious fanatic dead set on driving us out of the Middle East. While I could understand why an Arabian Moslem Patriot might want to drive us out of the Middle East. We weren’t really in the Middle East to be driven out. Whatever holy war he was fighting was in his head, from my point of view. When I learned about the Taliban, and their harboring bin Laden’s al Qaeda, I was all for going into Afghanistan. I still am for that.

But when Bush began to talk about a War on Terror, and the Axis of Evil, and Saddam Hussein and Weapons of Mass Destruction, I thought he’d been driven crazy by the 9/11 attack. I doubted Hussein was a threat to us. I doubted that Hussein was a threat to Israel. I thought he was a windbag who stayed in power by rattling sabers. Okay with me. We’d proven we could take him out in a heartbeat already. I had no problem with ratchetting up the pressure on him for inspections. We can rattle sabers too. I had trouble taking Bush seriously – never thought he’d act on it. Then it got louder and louder, and Powell went to the U.N. When the war started, I thought that either we must know something that wasn’t being said or that Bush was a mad man in need of mental health care. It never occurred to me that our leaders, as loony as they are, would take us there for the reasons we now know.

As things developed, I started learning about neoconservatives, and the Bush Doctrine, and that I’d diagnosed the wrong person as a mad. It was Cheney and Rumsfeld. I was agape at the horrid mess the Administration had made of things. And then there was Richard Clarke, and Paul O’niell, and Karen K., and Joe Wilson, and the whistle-blowers and it became apparent what they had done. And I learned about Shiites and Sunnis and I was at a loss. What of the Iraqi people? What had started out as an absurd idea of Regime Change, became a nightmare of Regime Absence. It reminded me of Yugoslovia after Tito. There was no Yugoslovia. It was a bunch of groups and they all hated each other and wanted to fight to the death over who knows what. Right now, the Shiites and Sunnis are fighting each other in Iraq, and best I can tell, the Shiites are now fighting with other Shiites. What are they fighting about? Who knows? I don’t.

So, what do we owe the Iraqi people? We opened Pandora’s Box, and every attempt we’ve made to close it has failed. We removed their leadership, bad as it might have been, disbanded the leading Party, and shut down the entire Army. The result has been five years of chaos and death. It seems on the one hand that we owe the Iraqis something for invading the country under false pretenses with selfish motives. On the other hand, how can we repay that debt? I’m not sure. When we send soldiers, they kill them. When we send money, it doesn’t make any difference. Just because we’ve dealt them a tremendous blow doesn’t mean we can fix it. So when McCain says, "We owe it to the Iraqi people," he’s going to have to say more about how whatever we owe them is going to be repaid. If the answer is American bankrupcy and the endless death of American children, I say "No thanks." If he can figure out some way to repay them that makes us even, fine. But just sitting around throwing money into a hole in the desert and killing our children isn’t an answer to the question.