NOT THE LIBERALS' KIND OF WAR
Here we are taking on a starving nation with a GDP of $10 billion versus $10,000 billion of our own. Our annual defense spending is 100 times that of Iraq's. 500,000 Iraqi kids have died in the last 12 years due to the effect of the last war. Most of the children alive are stunted due to the lack of food. The world's only military superpower is taking on a country which cannot feed its people or provide safe drinking water.
And we call our "war" - shock and awe. 800 cruise missiles to rain down on the hapless Iraqis. Yeah, I am shocked by the depravity and awed by the brutality. No wonder, Powell had the painting of Picasso's Guernica covered up when he addressed the UN.
To call this a "war" is to insult the intelligence of every decent person on this planet. No warrior would ever pick up arms for such a massacre. But the chickenhawks of this administration excel only in their cowardice and corruption. A $5 trillion trophy awaits the end of the massacre.
"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one--on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful--as usual--will shout for the war. The pulpit will-- warily and cautiously--object--at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers--as earlier-- but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation--pulpit and all-- will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
Mark Twain
It is a not a Liberal's Kind of War nor a Conservative's Kind of War - It is just a Cowardly Massacre. |
