jw: Where Is This Nation Heading...?
I'm concerned about the path we are on and here are some of my thoughts...
A London newspaper, The Guardian, has quoted a source close to the administration as saying, "This has been the worst diplomatic debacle of our lifetime." A senior White House official is also quoted as saying, in a voice reportedly awash with sarcasm, "There's a recognition that this has not been our finest diplomatic hour."
There is no calculating the understatement here. There was never any serious diplomacy involved here to begin with. This has been a disaster, and IMO it is about to get worse by orders of magnitude.
The weapons inspectors, empowered by UN resolution 1441 to ferret out the weapons everyone is so concerned about, have packed their bags and fled Iraq. They have been betrayed by the Bush administration, by Tony Blair and by Spain, as they worked to protect us from both these weapons and from the dreadful effects of a war in the Middle East.
The inspections were working – weapons were being dismantled, Hussein was under control, and no mass destruction materials were found. The fact that the hammer has come down before these inspectors were even half done with their work means, simply, that those pushing for war never wanted the inspections to work in the first place.
Welcome to the timeline.
Very soon now, perhaps within the next 72 hours, the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" battle plan will be put into effect. 3,000 munitions, including some 800 cruise missiles, could rain down on Baghdad, a city inhabited by some 5 million civilians (many of them are children).
The Arab news service Al Jazeera, operating out of Qatar, will capture images of thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians laying shattered and bloody in the Baghdad streets, in a manner quite like the bodies we saw in New York on September 11. The resulting explosion of rage within the moderate and extremist Muslim world could be immediate and ferocious.
Saddam Hussein will not flee, and his forces will stand in Baghdad. American troops will be forced to fight downtown.
The oilheads in Iraq will be fired, and the pipeheads may be opened.
American homeland security forces – police, fire fighters and emergency rescue personnel – will monitor their radios nervously, waiting for the inevitable call. They know, better than anyone, that this country is not ready to defend itself against an attack. Their budgets have been gutted, the promised funding to augment their preparedness has not come. They are not ready, but they stand and wait regardless, because that is what they have pledged to do.
Somewhere in America – perhaps in New York, perhaps in Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Detroit, San Francisco or Atlanta there could be an explosion. A group that cares nothing for the well being of Saddam Hussein will take responsibility, in the name of those thousands of Iraqi Muslims slaughtered in the initial aerial bombardment of Baghdad.
The body bags will come out, here at home and across the sea in Iraq, as Americans begin to die.
An oil shock will roll across the global community, ripping through an already fragile economic situation. Here at home, the financial cost of this war will hurl us further into deficit.
More explosions may echo across the streets of America. They could be nuclear or biological or chemical in nature, because in the effort to overthrow Hussein we have ignored completely the fact that al Qaeda certainly possesses the capabilities to attack us with these weapons, having needed no help whatsoever from Hussein. These explosions could come from simple fertilizer, as well. Remember that two men with a sniper rifle and a car held Maryland hostage for a month. It does not take much, considering the shoddy state of affairs in the homeland security realm.
In all likelihood, America will score a decisive military victory. U.S. forces will work to stabilize Iraq. The Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root will begin construction on any number of permanent military bases. Administration officials will begin to formulate plans for the removal of other governments in the Middle East, both friendly and unfriendly, by any means necessary.
Civil war will break out in Iraq as the Shia majority, the Kurdish and Sunni minorities, go for each other's throats. American occupation work there will become infinitely complicated.
The United States of America has concluded an incredible, perhaps unstoppable, race to the bottom since January of 2001. The disputed election brought to power a mob of men – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc. – who have been planning this war since at least 1997. The attacks of September 11 gave these men in the PNAC the excuse for war with Iraq.
The Bush administration's reaction to 9/11 – placing blame on "evildoers" instead of starting an honest dialogue, blocking an independent investigation of the attack for over a year, nominating master secret-keeper Henry Kissinger to chair that investigative panel in what was perhaps the most disgusting insult possible to the families of the lost, ignoring the real terrorist threats in order to focus on the politically expedient annihilation of Iraq, instituting the most arrogant diplomatic push ever seen in the history of this nation by utterly ignoring the eleven Security Council members who said no to this war, disrupting international relations vital to the pursuit of true terrorist threats, and all the while underfunding the homeland defenses necessary to protect the American people – has led us to this dismal place.
The destruction of Saddam Hussein will do nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada, to protect America. It will place America and her citizens in further peril. We stand alone and naked today. We will reap the whirlwind...The inevitable blowback from our actions will come.
Btw, This is JMHO and I hope some of the things I have predicted do not happen...Lets pray for Saddam to have the wisdom to step down and leave the country but I do not expect to see him do that...I will support our troops 100% but I question the wisdom of the leadership coming from the White House and the Pentagon.
regards,
-s2@lookingforamorehumbleForeignPolicy.com |
