Anorexia, SPX retrospectives coming soon. In the meantime, here are some of the random, disconnected thoughts that I’m sure you’ve all come to know and love from ADDTF:
I’m very glad the President gave his little speech last night, though I didn’t get a chance to watch it. One of the reasons the war’s opponents have been able to make so much hay out of the Post-War Chaos (TM) that, y’know, has never ever happened after any war ever, is because Bush & Co. have been spending the last few months doing the whole crime-scene “keep moving, nothing to see here” routine for the American people. Well, duh, there’s definitely something to see, and it’s important that we see it. If you’re as sold on the real reasons for Gulf War II as I am, and as the administration claims to be, you’ve got to make this case, over and over and over again. If you don’t, you run the risk of letting Howard Dean and Maureen Dowd set the tone for what’s going on over there and why it’s going on, which is potentially disastrous. The single greatest risk facing this country is that large segments of the population will start thinking “Hey, 9/11 was two whole years ago now–isn’t it time for things to get back to normal?” The answer, as much as anyone would like to believe otherwise, is no; we MUST learn the lessons about complacency (or, in the case of so many of our old-world and third-world “allies,” complicity) in the face of theocratic-fascist terrorism that those falling buildings tried to teach us.
This means making the necessary points about Saddam Hussein’s late regime, loudly and often: that his connections to terrorism (including, through Ansar Al-Islam, al Qaeda) were well established; that his WMD capacity was, until challenging it became the easiest way to piss on the Bush Administration, almost universally unquestioned; that for most people, being “anti-war” meant nothing more or less than being anti-THIS war, fought by THIS adminitration (after all, the opposition to this war, were it successful, would have ensured the prolongation of the low-level war between Saddam’s Iraq and the Air Forces of the US and UK; as well as that between the economic sanctions of the UN and the Iraqi civilians of whom Baathist criminality and UN complicity made victims; as well as those between Saddam and all the Kurds, Marsh Arabs, Shi’ites and dissidents within his range; as well as that between Saddam and the bus-riders and cafe-goers of Israel (as waged through his proxies in Palestine); as well as the endless bellicose gestures toward Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and, of course, the United States); that if the war were avoided, the anti-war contingent (led by M. Chirac, in the main) would have eventually returned to its previous cause celebre, the removal of sanctions, and would have done so probably at the same speed with which they had swapped their previous claims that such sanctions equalled genocide for the notion that the sanctions represented an almost Solomon-wise bit of diplomacy; that the moment this occurred Saddam would begin whipping up those backyard-buried, file-maintained WMD programs and begun the whole macabre dance anew, during which time countless thousands more Iraqis would starve, be executed, be tortured, be disappeared, or if they were lucky simply be indoctrinated into the grotesque cult of personality that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
It galls me to no end that up until this point, the Bush Administration had so little faith in its constituency that these arguments were seen as unnecessary, if not downright dangerous, to make; it galls me further that last night’s address was, if the pundits are to be believed, a fairly half-hearted and disingenuous stab at so doing. But it’s better than nothing, I suppose, to claim that we’re in it for the long haul, even if you don’t make it clear to us what “it” is and why we’re “in” it. Does Bush himself know? I’m just not sure, not any longer. But to reference the kind of pre-9/11 government-conspiracy jargon that was once my stock in trade and now seems so sadly credulous in man’s ability to get any kind of large-scale project done: I want to believe.