worth [wurth]
–preposition
| 1. |
good or important enough to justify (what is specified): advice worth taking; a place worth visiting. |
Presidents Bush and Cheney have had dramatic disconnects between what they say and what they do from the very beginning. Their speeches are always sales pitches -, rarely heartfelt, rarely personal, rarely of interest to anyone but supporters, and rarely factual. Yesterday, we heard a speech from Senator Obama that sounded like it came from him. He didn’t try to sell something. He tried to confront a truth. It’s impact will be measured by others, but for me – it confirmed my intuition that he will bring an honesty to the White House that has been missing for much too long.
President Bush is going to give a speech today. Like most of his speeches, it is written from a conclusion – a very monotonous conclusion. He will say, in essence, that the Iraq War has been "worth it." Worth what? we might ask. 4000 Americans dead. Untold Iraqi people dead. A back seat in world politics. A crisis in confidence about our form of government. A politicized Department of Justice. Erosion of our governmental structure at every level. A colapsing economy. Political polarization at a staggering level among our people. No slight notion that our reasons for going to war had anything to do with why we went. A dramatically weakened military. A dramatically escalated National Debt. A history of corruption in government that pales any modern period. As the King of Siam said in The King and I, "et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
Are wars ever "worth it?" That they must be fought isn’t the question. Heretofore, our major wars have been defensive, or at least touted as being defensive. There’s no real way to claim that here, unless you say "the best defense is a good offense." We were provoked, but not by Iraq. We were more accurately, "enticed" by the oil reserves under the Iraq sand. He didn’t bring home that bacon. In truth, that’s a good thing. It’s wasn’t his to bring. This was, and will always be seen, as a war of foreign conquest – a failed war of foreign conquest. Beyond that, he continues to say "our enemies would see an American failure in Iraq as evidence of weakness and lack of resolve." So, this war, undertaken by deceit, has come down to being a war to justify it’s having been undertaken. We are fighting a war to justify itself. In his twisted mind, winning, in some as yet unspecified way, would justify his starting this war in the first place. In fact, no matter what the ultimate outcome, the Iraq War will never have been "worth it" – any "it." No matter how long we wait, the Bush Administration will not have been "worth it." The only possibility for any worth in this era will be if we learn that our recurrent flirtations with Fascism [rule of the powerful] always come to this…
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