Iraq War News - War is Hell, no matter how badass you think you are

As Bush continues his uphill battle of convincing the world that all is well in the vast space between his ears, and continues to try to sell us the war, or to put it on lay away for the next poor sucker who becomes president, his neo-con Master, Donald Rumsfield, is taking some heat of his own. It seems that all those words that used to drop like golden pearls from his thin lips now just sound flat and pathetic. Nevertheless, he still manages to circumlocute whenever the topic of ending the war comes up, largely because he really doesn’t want it to end; he has not yet finished his work.

The news from the Front is that the war is not going the way that Rummy promised it would. He had conceived of an easy-to-win campaign whereby the US would have secured not only the whole of Iraq and its oil supplies but also the border between Iran and Iraq, and thus Iran. It has always been the goal of Rummy & the rest of the neo-con cadre to control primary resources if not from afar via faceless corporations then up close and personal via war. But the realities on the ground really are at odds with the slick, action movie images that he and his cadre sold to Bush, via Cheney. Still, they march onward, declaring that it is the duty of the United States to spread Democracy, even if it means people have to die and states have to lose their autonomy.

If all of America shared Rummy’s vision for an Imperial American State, he might have been able to pull off at least part of this madness. But the fact is that most Americans are good people, and they really do not want to make a habit of going around invading other countries. Americans really do not want to spend that kind of money. They don’t want to give up social programs for the elderly and the underclass in order to provoke another decades long war. And that is precisely what the news on the ground is: it will take decades to subdue the Iraq people and break them so that they no longer disobey.

In the meantime, the reality of Iraq is that it is an expensive experiment in re-creating for the modern age the Imperial ambitions of empires now lost forever. Since history does repeat itself, we can only wonder how long it will take for the Neo-con Empire to go down in flames. There is no other direction for it to go.

Tags:   bush, cheney, iraq, rumsfeld

© All rights reserved.

Posted on 3/27/2006 ( Permanent Link )
 Send to Friend