In this week’s episode: the slow, ponderous march to war continues. At the risk of inducing the mental equivalent of a charlie horse, I’ve continued to try to follow the United States’ logic in its argument for attacking Iraq. Let me get this straight: the US is pushing for the UN to punish Iraq for breaching an earlier UN resolution and if the UN doesn’t comply the US will…breach a UN resolution?!? Ow, ow, ow! Can anyone say “doublethink“?
Meanwhile, the United States continues to act like a spoiled frat jock, delivering political wedgies and noogies for all who oppose them. Consider this little gem:
“Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. All you do is leave behind a lot of noisy baggage.”
Who said it? If you said “Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense”, you win the grand prize: unilateral US military action!
Don’t get me wrong, Saddam’s a bad guy. But there are a lot of bad guys in the world and the US doesn’t seem to normally have any problem trading with any of them on a regular basis. Heck, they’ve even armed and trained them on occasion. And only now the US chooses to play John Wayne and clean up the Wild West? Oh, that’s right. Now there’s more money in ousting them than arming them.
The problem is the US doesn’t recognize the hypocrisy it displays in promoting its own brand of democracy: freedom, liberty and democracy for all, just as long as you agree with us and let us do whatever the hell we want. As Bill Maher pointed out in his recent book, “When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden“, the reason the outside world hates the US is because it is so painfully clueless about why the outside world should even have reason to hate the US.
Politicians such as Rumsfeld are supposed to not only possess the ability to adeptly build consensus but also the intelligence to use that ability. Incendiary comments such as those of Rumsfeld only reinforce the stereotype of the US as a spoiled, self-absorbed child that takes its ball home when people don’t play by its rules. And then it wonders why people want to do crazy things like, say, fly planes into buildings.