The Bush administration have recently revived their “flypaper” theory of war, in which Iraq serves to attract terrorists so that we can kill them at a comfortable remove from our own back yards.
In his speech last Tuesday Mr. Bush credited General John Vines with the formulation, telling his Fort Bragg audience that the general they served under said “We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.” Mr. Bush repeated the assertion (which Vines cribbed from him or possibly Scott McClellan in the first place) in his radio address today, saying, “At posts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world, our men and women in uniform are taking the fight to the terrorists overseas, so that we do not have to face the terrorists here at home.”
Consider for a moment the colossal, monumental, gobsmacking, mind-numbingly hideous arrogance required to tell someone — and not just tell them, but brag about it — that we have invaded their country, killed tens of thousands of their countrymen and thrown open their borders to terrorists who are killing yet more thousands of their countrymen, all “so that we do not have to face the terrorists here at home.”
Never mind the nonsensical notion that the terrorists going to Iraq for their urban warfare graduate degrees would otherwise be swarming our gates, and its corollary, that there are no terrorists who are not hypnotically drawn to the flame of Iraq: it’s the sheer depravity of it that’s damned near incomprehensible. It’s like telling your neighbor that you kicked in his door so a roving band of rapists could have at his daughter instead of yours.
Well, not just you; a coalition of neighbors, actually, and we all know he abused her anyway.
At the risk of veering off into the forbidden area of “understanding,” something we understand is inimical to success in wartime, is there really anyone in this country who honestly cannot understand that telling someone we’ve torched their country to keep someone else from torching ours might engender just the tiniest bit of resentment?
The reasoning behind the flypaper theory is only slightly advanced from tossing a virgin into the volcano to placate the gods. Despite our lack of sophistication, though, many Iraqis are prepared to forgive us our arrogance and indifference so long as we don’t completely destroy their hopes for a calmer future.
Naturally, we reward this patience by killing their relatives.
Some Iraqi’s reaction to the speech: “can’t they have their war on terror some place else?”
One of the more disturbing moments in the presidential pep talk was
when GW asked his younger listeners to consider millitary service. With the
dropoff in enlistment this was to be expexcted, yet I found it ironic coming
from a man who did what he could to stay out of harms way during the Vietnam war
(unlike his opponent in the presidential election). Deferrment a la Cheney
is not an option for many of the young recruits from poorer families that
are lured into service with ever increasing financial incentives. Another striking thing is the ever changing
rationale for this war, from WMDs, to Saddam is a really evil guy, to the
latest where our objective is to establish a shining example of Muslim
democracy that will spread throiughout the middle east and bring peace to
the region. If we are to consider this latest argument then one might ask
why didn’t we concentrate on Afghanistan for nation building and the spread
of goodwill. It might have started working by now. I am really starting to wonder what it will take to wake our citizens up from their stupor, maybe a treasonous act from Karl Rove like revealing the identity of a CIA operative. Who knows…?
William Harrington
Professor of Medicine
University of Miami
I’m glad to see Mr. Berger pointing out the lunacy of the flypaper theory of terrorism. I have heard Bush recite this idea so many times that either someone in the administration is beginning to believe it, or they think we have all been pithed.
The worst part of the flypaper idea is, as noted above, the presumption that, in some perverted concept of self-defense, it is OK to kill/ maim/ torture a random, innocent third party (the Iraqi people). But flypaper also seems to assume that the criminal Osama BL et al. have agreed to Bush’s choice in war fronts and war timing. Not likely. And if so, how long and on what other issues have we been negotiating with OBL?
More likely, Bush’s America will continue to spill innocent blood for his self-aggrandizing global game of Whack-a-Mole, while he continues to justify it with nonsense ideas, confidently spoken.
If only we could wake up and wake up soon.
Like various other things, it does amaze me that so many simply accept (or even in fact support) what to me seems patently immoral, besides being simply ridiculous.
BTC underlines a major example. Clearly, to be blunt, there is a certain feeling that Iraqis just aren’t worth as much as Americans. This makes them somewhere below the level of blasocysts in current US political thought.
c.3000K people died on 9/11, hundreds foreigners. Many more died in Iraq as a direct result of this bloody (in all natures of the term) war. On pretty suspect reasoning, this is supposed to (other than the life and limbs of our own service personnel) be a good thing, since “hey it’s not our blood.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created unequal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … unless they aren’t living here.”
It would be interesting to hear from the Iraqi population. The ones with running water for only two hours a day while living in 110 degree temperature. The ones with children who don’t have water to bathe them with or even wash their clothing in. How about the parents whose children have been blown up into pieces due to our bombs. Let’s hear from them. Maybe they would have a different view of things.
We are stealing their oil and we have built a “Green Zone.” There are contractors there from all different countries feeding off of their land. We have liberated them from Hussein all right and delivered them into the hands of a very dangerous GWB.
Maybe this is why they are so very pissed off?
I our troops are being killed and maimed. Children and babies are being blown to pieces. And the world is looking at us. Good job GWB.
Article from David Sirota
Iraq, Vietnam & the Insulated Elites Who Got/Kept Us There The
American Heritage Dictionary defines “insulated” as being “in a
detached or isolated position.” Sadly, that describes the state among
both Republican and Democratic elitists in Washington, D.C. these days
when it comes to Iraq. As Chris Bowers expertly documents, polls show
that Americans overwhelmingly want an exit strategy from Iraq that
includes a withdrawal plan in the immediate future. Yet, a new poll
of Beltway “insiders” who claim to represent Americans shows the
exact opposite – these insulated operatives, who never have to face
the battlefield consequences of thier policies, want to keep the war
humming along as is. Yes, there has been a vocal cadre of courageous
lawmakers who oppose this Establishment pro-war consensus. But their
efforts have been voted down at every turn. Meanwhile, Republicans
attack as unpatriotic anyone who questions the war, and high-profile
Democrats are, at best, able to muster muted criticism of the war’s
handling, but too gutless to really represent the desire for
withdrawal that the majority of the country supports. These Democrats
probably feel that if they voted for the war in the first place they
can’t be against it now – even though all they would have to say is
the truth: they were lied to about why we were going to war in the
first place. This weekend, while taking a break from finishing up my
book, I came upon the movie “The Fog of War” – it is a documentary
interview of Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. I didn’t
previously buy into the argument that Iraq was like Vietnam, but in
watching this movie, I am not so sure anymore, both because of the
worsening chaos there, and because of the similarities between the
Vietnam-era political establishment and today’s political
establishment. As the movie shows, Washington elites kept pushing the
war on the grounds that we needed to create “Vietnamese freedom,” in
the words of Lyndon Johnson. Both political parties kept saying we
couldn’t withdraw for various manufactured political reasons – with
almost no regard to the bloodshed and colossal misdirection the
conflict was creating. It is almost the same thing today. We have an
entrenched class of Beltway elites in both parties who think they are
the experts, and they therefore have every right to ignore the will of
the people they are supposed to be representing, even if it means
higher and higher casualties. I’m not sure how much worse things in
Iraq need to become to wake these politicians up – but I do believe
politicians’ fundamental arrogance in ignoring the public’s will in
such a life-and-death situation is sowing the seeds of cynicism about
our political system for years to come.