Fumbling For A Case For War
(YellowTimes.org) – Well, the evidence just keeps accumulating. I think it is a remarkable testimonial to President Bush's restraint
that he has waited this long.
After reading Tony Blair's dossier on torture in Iraq, the impulse to launch everything the Pentagon has must have been
almost irresistible.
Imagine, torture taking place in a brutal dictatorship? Good Lord, this comes as a shocking revelation.
But perhaps the President was reminded of tens of thousands tortured by America's friends, or by Americans themselves,
in Iran or Chile or Nicaragua or El Salvador or Vietnam when he paused, thinking a less-than-perfect case had been made
for sending millions of pounds of high explosives and depleted uranium raining down on the people of Iraq.
Perhaps he was reminded of the way that beacon of democracy and human rights in the Middle East, Israel, has quietly
tortured its captives for half a century, and, in more than a few cases, outright murdered batches of them.
Or he may have recalled reports from Amnesty International about the common brutality of American law enforcement. A
prominent lawyer's disgusting campaign to establish formal procedures for torture in America may just have slowed his
hand. Or it may have been thoughts of the abysmal treatment of Afghan prisoners kept chained in Cuban cages, not to
speak of the way his brutish allies in Afghanistan were encouraged publicly by the Secretary of Defense to murder
prisoners en masse.
But I doubt it. Bush is simply not a wimp when other peoples' lives are concerned. He seems capable of sustaining his
equilibrium - with its quirky mix of being on a mission for God and nasty frat-boy sense of humor - even in the face of
great adversity, so long as it is someone else's adversity.
I'm sure his hand again started for the red phone when he heard recent, damning reports on the evils of Islam, coming as
they did from such towering figures as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart. An outsider might be forgiven
for regarding the good gentlemen's remarks as something akin to theology lessons from the shriveled lips of retired
Imperial Wizards of the Klu Klux Klan.
But the words of these men carry weight in several important Bush constituencies including Beany Baby collectors,
survivalists living in abandoned Air Force missile silos stocked with tons of ammo and freeze-dried rations, and folks
who take their annual vacations watching cartoons and shopping channels on satellite TV from recreational vehicles
parked next to the cinder-block splendor of a Wal-Mart.
Jimmy Swaggart, for example, shares the President's character-building experience as recovered reprobate, having had his
rather arcane sexual practices with a prostitute exposed in magazines some years ago. It was the kind of publicity that
hits the collection plate mighty hard. But old Jimmy's a fighter. Equipped as he is with tear ducts capable of gushing
on command and an amazing rubbery face that mimics any known expression of mock piety, once again he made the
revival-tent crowds roar for more.
Jimmy came back to collect again, just as the President came back from his former, well-publicized life of rude, drunken
abuse and failure to do anything worthwhile - although some might argue he succeeded only in removing the word drunken
from the description. Still, in the President's circle, people with such character credentials are regarded as
authorities when it comes to recognizing evil.
And now, an amazing piece of evidence comes to light. We have a previously-obscure reporter who knows someone at the FBI
whose second-cousin on his mother's side made an important discovery. A few years back, in the course of taking rolls of
souvenir snapshots of the smoldering ruins at Oklahoma City, the second-cousin happened to spot a couple of shady
characters with moustaches.
She knew instinctively they were shady, because they didn't take one souvenir snapshot of the smoking destruction
streaked with blood. They just stood there talking and looking. Is that the way a real American acts? Besides these guys
just didn't look like real Americans.
Well, just to be sure, she snapped a picture of them, and, for a while, she kept it pinned to the big, pink, stuffed
satin, heart-shaped bulletin board over her bed, right next to her autographed picture of Lt. Calley smiling in front of
a burned-out hut in Vietnam. But eventually, word got around the trailer park, and, sure enough, her cousin from the FBI
stopped by one day to ask for the picture.
Everyone at the Bureau was convinced immediately that the men in the snapshot were Iraqi agents - after all, the key to
future promotion in the Bureau today is one's ability to recognize such things - and they've leaked their views to the
press, just as they did in their memorable struggles against Richard Jewel and Wen Ho Lee. Well, almost, but this time
the New York Times or the Atlanta Constitution weren't quite so interested, so the FBI had to dig up an obscure reporter
who needed a break in life to become somebody. When they found a struggling, former reporter for her high school
yearbook at a faith healing in Altoona, Illinois, they knew immediately they had the right person for the job of getting
the story out.
This happy discovery also means America's own son, Tim McVeigh, only did what he did under the insidious, all-reaching
influence of Iraqi agents, an innocent lamb led astray by agents of the Antichrist who now strides the earth posing as
the second Hitler - although there appears to be a modest disagreement in Bush circles on this exact description of
Saddam Hussein since good old 'Rev' Falwell earlier proclaimed that the Antichrist was in fact Jewish.
The President is convinced he has the goods on Hussein. Now, he just sits back to wait for a formal casus belli. He
knows Hussein will leave out a semicolon or mix a metaphor or give a pronoun an ambiguous antecedent somewhere in his 12
thousand page document describing Iraq's weapons' programs. After all, you can't expect a bunch of damn Arab peasants to
get such things right. And when the President's team of shrieking, fanatical advisors finds the error, it will prove to
the world that Hussein still tries to hide the truth the President has always understood.
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- John Chuckman encourages your comments: jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
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