Wednesday, August 28, 2002

War On Sanity

Charley Reese

STUDS Terkel, the old Chicago writer, has it dead right. Mr. Bush's war on terrorism is really a war on sanity. In all my years of observing the political scene, I've never heard so much nonsense from so many important people.

It is a policy based on the Big Lie and therefore is bound to fail.

The truth is this: The terrorist attacks against the United States are a direct result of our one-sided support of Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. That's it, pure and simple.

Bush, however, does not have the moral fortitude to admit that. Therefore, he had to concoct a Big Lie to explain the attack. Oh, he said, they hate us because we are free. This is absurd on its face. Why would Arabs or anybody else care one way or another whether we were free or enslaved? It's no skin off their noses either way. The rest of the world does not wake up in the morning worrying about the American people. They have their own lives to live.

But, as a consequence of the Big Lie, Bush is doing absolutely nothing to end terrorism. Terrorism, like all human action, proceeds from a cause for a purpose. If you want to end it, you have to remove the cause. Instead, Bush is imitating the Israelis and thinks that killing people, jailing people, deporting people and threatening people will solve the problem. Those tactics have not worked for the Israelis, and they will not work for us.

To be able to kill your way out of a terrorism problem assumes that there is a finite number of terrorists. There is not; the ranks are constantly being refilled. Does anyone think that if someone kills members of our family, we're going to love the killer? If someone destroys our home and our possessions, we're going to like that person? Every time we inflict death, wounds and destruction on people, we recruit more enemies.

Nothing is more insane than the idea being floated by some advocates of war with Iraq that invading American soldiers will be cheered and showered with candy and flowers by the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein only kills his political enemies; we have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and heaped misery on millions more. Our crimes against the Iraqi people far outnumber those of Saddam. By our brutal and callous actions, we have made Saddam a lesser evil.

War with Iraq will not be like the war in Afghanistan. It will be like the battle in Mogadishu made famous by the movie "Black Hawk Down." To take out Saddam, American soldiers are going to have a fight street by street, house by house. We'll see how much stomach for war America's armchair generals have when the bodies start coming home, not by tens or twelves, but by the hundreds.

Another example of insanity is the belief that we can have a surgical war inside Iraq and that the rest of the Middle East will remain intact. For one thing, the Israelis will very likely inject themselves into the war and use it as an excuse to expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. This has long been Ariel Sharon's dream, and the temptation will be more than he can resist. This will be a monstrous crime against humanity and very likely will cause the entire Middle East to explode.

Unfortunately, our president is a naive man -- and in foreign affairs an ignorant man -- who has fallen under the influence of the Israeli government. The big pushers for war with Iraq are the usual suspects - Americans with a long record of pretending to speak about America's interests when in fact they are pushing an Israeli agenda.

You can be sure that Israeli intelligence is telling Bush all kinds of fairy tales about Saddam's capabilities and evil intentions and how imperative it is to go to war soon. Bush let the cat out of the bag when he said the other day, "I will make my decision based on intelligence, from our people and from our allies." By that, he means Israel, because the British, the French, the Germans and the Russians are damn sure not telling him to attack Iraq.