The DavidCyrus Blog of Wisdom

Life In our Bizarro World
War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, Bush was Right

Remember the joke about asking a man why he was hitting himself on the head with a hammer? He replies, "Because it feels so good when I stop!" Well, friends, Americans have reached that point with the Bush administration. After five full years of anti-American, unconstitutional, underhanded elitist dealings in the Executive branch, suddenly newspapers have stopped arguing, discontinued the debate, and wearily confessed, "Bush was right all along!" Peace and free elections are busting out all over the Middle East, just like Bush planned it. The New York Times, no less, that rag of such loathing from Rightists everywhere, is suddenly trumpeting the praises of the Bush Doctrine.

In the face of this nationwide Orwellian trance, Robert Kuttner from the Boston Globe has got it right, by questioning the causality of world happiness as a result Bush wisdom.

In short, saying Bush caused peace in Palestine is like saying Reagan beat communism. Sure, plenty of people have said those things, but anybody who understands international politics knows that neither President really caused the events that simply happened under their watch. Let's recall how fervently the Bush administration has denied their own responsibilities in the 9/11 attacks (which is understandable, since by some counts, it actually happened under President Gore's watch).

Another smart rebuttal to the idea of a calculated fostering of true democracy is presented by Seumas Milne at "The Guardian". To quote the article,

"What the US campaign is clearly not about is the promotion of democracy in either Lebanon or Syria, where the most plausible alternative to the Assad regime are radical Islamists. In a pronouncement which defies satire, Bush insisted on Tuesday that Syria must withdraw from Lebanon before elections due in May "for those elections to be free and fair". Why the same point does not apply to elections held in occupied Iraq - where the US has 140,000 troops patrolling the streets, compared with 14,000 Syrian soldiers in the Lebanon mountains - or in occupied Palestine, for that matter, is unexplained."

But let's take another look at the death toll. That has a pretty clear link to Bush decisions, right? Certainly, we aren't going to pretend that someone else ordered the attacks on Iraq. At least 16,000 civilians have been killed during this war, over 1500 American soldiers are dead, over 11,000 are wounded, and darn it all if gas prices aren't still going through the roof.

"It never was about gas prices", you might say. Well, wasn't it? Didn't we all sorta understand, without really mentioning it, that the real reason our army was in Iraq instead of Sudan was to secure Iraq's strategic oil reserves? I mean, it's been proven that it wasn't because of Saddam's 9/11 involvement, or Weapons of Mass Destruction, since none of that was true. But we knew about the oil- if everything else went bad, at least gas prices were going down, right? Wrong.

Other Bush dividends: Nobody wants to join the Army anymore. The Iraqi war is so screwed up that we've transformed a flood of military recruits post-9/11 to a trickle of volunteers that are missing recruitment goals in 2005.

Meanwhile, we still have hundreds of people locked up in Cuba, since early 2002, and we are still being told that this is a completely acceptable human-rights situation.