Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2
August
7, essay, “State of the Global War on Terror”
Back when George W. Bush was the
governor of Texas
I never dreamed that he had it in him to start a war. We in the down-home media thought him a
harmless man who fully deserved his C average in college, spoke with errors,
and couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to pronounce the language like a Texan
or a Yankee. I met the man when I
interviewed to be the Bush Team speech writer back in 1996. His media Medea,
Karen Hughes, stood a full head taller than he did. He hardly seemed bellicose.
But after September 11, 2001, the president was a changed man. He told us on television that he was a nice
guy with a tough job to do. At the time
we didn’t know what the tough job was, but we rallied behind him as our leader
because it was a time of crisis.
According to General Wesley Clark (CNN Crossfire, June 25), the “tough
job” the Bush Team then set about was a hawkish grab of control in the Middle
East before the Chinese could ramp up a military to oppose us. It was high-stakes poker right out of the old
West – all with the aim of making America a safer place, of
course. The prez
loved it.
Before the end of 2001, we had invaded Afghanistan
to root out the Taliban and al-Qaeda. To
date we are still rooting them out, but the defiant landscape of Afghanistan
encourages them to take root again. It’s
about as frustrating for us as it was for the Soviets, who tried the same thing
to no good result.
In his 2002 state of the union address the president
said we needed to oppose an Axis of Evil made up of Iraq,
Iran and North Korea. Afterwards, the leaders of Iraq, Iran
and North Korea
began to act paranoid, and we were told that this was proof that that they were
all crazy and dangerous.
For a solid year, the Bush Team spent a year fudging
up intelligence to support an invasion of Iraq,
and most of America
became supportive as a result. But there
were notable exceptions among top people.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was one, and he tried to muffle the
drumbeat of war, until President Bush bullied him back into line. Pentagon generals had their doubts about the
details of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, until the Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld bullied them back into line. The intelligence community suggested that Iraq
wasn’t all that imminent a threat, until Vice President Cheney bullied them
back into line.
Needless to say, by this year’s state of the union
address, everyone was in line, and loudly cheering the Bush Team. From his bully pulpit, the president preached
a Baptist sermon of just war: Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections, represented an
imminent threat, and needed to be neutralized, pronto, period!
On March 20 we began the job. The vast majority of misinformed America
was in favor of it, while the vast majority of the informed world was against
it. To keep us entertained and
motivated, Bush Team member Victoria Clark, head cheerleader at Pentagon public
affairs, offered up a prime time spectacular:
Shock and awe with embedded media. It was named like what it was: war pornography.
The halftime show of the exploding Baghdad skyline deserves special note. By God, we must have lit up ten heathen
temples in the Baghdad
for each of our two towers. I loved the
way the TV folks played with the images, sounds and speeds. It said a lot for American culture that we
showed it for the dinner hour You have
go back all the way back to the Roman Coliseum to find a spectacle to match
it. But the best part of the whole thing was a bad-luck
kid named Jessica who was turned into an ersatz Audie
Murphy to give the cameras something to film other than the messy battle of Baghdad.
In his Mayday speech of 2003, the president said that
from now on the U.S.
would run the American Middle East the way it used to run the American
West. All of that now seems dubious at
present, especially to the troops hunkering down in desert firefights.
Before his recent retreat to Texas, the president hastily summoned his
media, whom he had not addressed since before the war, to bully them back into line. He testily told them that he accepted
responsibility for all his misleading reasons because they served the greater
good of taking us to war.
I think the president has signaled where he will
fight his Alamo against his multiplying
critics. He’ll say “You became a lynch
mob wanting revenge for 911. Well, I let
you be a lynch mob so I could be the mob leader and pick out who got lynched,
and I picked Saddam Hussein. You can’t
blame me without blaming yourselves!”
He’ll be right, of course.
No two Texans think alike. The Bush Team, says
something like “We have made significant progress in our long-term, global war
on terror and against the Axis of Evil.”
Did you just read global
war? Yep. Axis? Yep. Get it yet?
The last time we had this kind of rhetoric was World War II. I believe that the “tough job” that “nice
guy” George W. Bush took upon us was taking control of the politics and
resources of the world’s most dangerous region.
He was willing to risk World War III for the prize then, and he’s
willing to risk it now. When we begin to
complain that we are sinking deeper into the quicksand, I expect the president
will try to bully us back into
line. He’ll testily tell us that he’s
been saying all along that it was a global war – and he’ll be right again.
Captain May , a
Desert Storm volunteer, served on the general staff of the Army’s 75th
Division, where he specialized in military intelligence and public affairs.
Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2