The People Have Spoken - Next!
You've got to ask yourself did Bush and company really not see it coming? They had no finger on the pulse of the country? The dissatisfactions and utter loss of faith in the administration heard daily through the media and on the street were utterly foreign to them? Were they so convinced that their way was the right and the only way?You might say that Bush and company really didn't have the confidence of the people of the United States to begin with, in his plans to invade another country far from North America, a country which had no hand at all in the attacks on New York and Washington. They were forewarned, their own intelligence-gathering agencies informed them, but Bush would not be moved, and his trusted cronies gave impetus to his ill-judged intent.
He was unmoved by the lack of support from the international community, but for a few exceptions, countries which saw it in their best interests to stay on the good side of the man who loved to proclaim "yer with us or agin us", and they became "the willing"; enablers unconvinced of the practicality and ethical underpinnings of the engagement, but willing enough to become part of the invasion and to share in the glory and the easy pickings.
Most other countries, traditional allies of the United States decided to sit out this adventure, more intent to remain within the bosom of the United Nations and its considered opinion, than to become part of the Coalition of the Willing. Now the chickens have come to home to roost. The question: is the world a better place, a safer place, has justice been done, is there hope for this particular future?
Tuesday’s mid-term elections in the United States has certainly got plenty of press here in Canada. Unsurprisingly, given all the dissatisfaction Americans have been expressing for the last year and increasingly so over the last few months. No one really expected the Republicans to do well in this vote. It has given the U.S. electorate the badly-needed opportunity to let the Bush administration know, unequivocally, how they feel about the incredibly short-sighted decision to invade Iraq, to unseat their own dictator whose brutal rule kept all the tribal passions and ethnic tensions in check, even if to do so he sacrificed some thousands of lives.
Now all hell has broken loose and the sectarian violence which U.S. and Iraqi officials love to address as infighting of no singular consequence but which looks amazingly similar to an all-out civil war to all other onlookers doesn’t look as though it’s going to go away any day soon.
Americans don’t like their soldiers to come home dead. Actually they don’t, all that much, like their soldiers to be in any foreign countries doing anything from keeping the peace, to bringing down dictators (not of their own), to teaching all about democracy, to actually fighting a war they see as not their business, so Bush hasn’t exactly endeared himself to a great bulk of the populace.
He didn’t get slapped in the face with the results of this by-election; he got sucker-punched. And much as Carl Rowe kept insisting the Republicans were set to sweep the polls, and much as Bush kept insisting he had complete faith in his Secretary of Defence, Rumsfeld has somehow seen his way clear, post-results to resigning the post he said he was happy with and had no regrets about. It seems his complacency wasn’t shared by the U.S. Armed Services in general, let alone the electorate.
It remains yet to be seen what a truly lame-duck president will be forced to do through this unequivocal public opinion slap-down. The U.S. has managed, yet again, to get itself into an awful mess that is costing lives abroad in great numbers, as well as their own. And mangling their own economic well-being into the trillion-stratosphere. The U.S. taxpayer will be ponying up for a long, long time, long after any successful extraction of their country from this particular platform in the Middle East.
A state that was not a threat to the West as it then stood under its firm-handed but brutal dictator is not now what it was then. It had already been adequately de-fanged post Desert Storm, when Bush pere moved in to safeguard Kuwaiti oil reserves. Iraq was a country, with all its faults, that had no interest whatever in collaborating with Sunni Wahabists, it was secular in government orientation, and was no friend either to Iran's Shi'ite ayatollahs. Now, the fury of religious zealotry has been unleashed on the country and civilians are dying from the plague of religious, tribal bloodlust.
How does a country extricate itself from ownership of this tragedy?
The question now is what do you do when you knock over a hornet's nest? Let's see: leave the hornets to sting one another to death? Um, won't those hornets look without to placate their anger?
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 08, 2006
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