To: stockman_scott who wrote (48882 ) 10/2/2002 2:09:45 PM From: Karen Lawrence Read Replies (1) | Respond to Great article Scott:Well, what do I do now? I have this information, what can I do with it?." I will tell you, I think that there is, and has been for a while now, a great whistling difference, an emptiness, a space in between what you see on the media as far as war on Iraq, and what the American people feel. War on Iraq makes for great television, it makes for great media, but the people themselves are not necessarily as wild about this idea as them media would lead us to believe. The media likes reporting on explosions and war, because reporting on economic meltdown and economic futures and bad stock markets and crooked corporate people, some of whom are deeply connected to the Bush administration, is not good television. It's boring and it's depressing. It makes people want to change the channel to go watch "Friends," or something that will make them forget about the fact that they're going to have to work another ten years to be able to retire. What brought me to that point was simply watching how this had developed. Saddam Hussein has been around for twelve years. In fact, he's been around for thirty years, but he has been an American problem ever since we stopped funding him and he turned on our allies. All of a sudden, in mid-August after three months of terrible economic news, and what looked to be an incredible catastrophe at the polls in the mid-term election for the Republicans, Saddam Hussein is now the most dangerous man on the face of the earth and has to be addressed militarily, immediately. This, in and of itself, supports the idea that they will instigate war to distract the American political populace from the sorry economic situation that we're in. It's only part of the story; it's only one half of the deal. All by itself, they might not have had the guts to go and do this. But at the same time it serves the purposes of the incredibly influential neo-conservative hawks in this administration, like Richard Pearl, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney to name a few, who very desperately want to rewrite the whole map in that region. They want to start with Iraq, they want to deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They want "total war" in the region.
