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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: broadstbull who wrote (8825)	4/6/2003 11:19:24 PM
From: Ron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21614

Andy Rooney: An Especially Bad War NEW YORK, April 6, 2003 A weekly commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney. I've lived a long while now and I don't remember any more unpleasant times than these. I'm not even interested in reading the sports pages. I hate everything about this war except that we're winning it. You can't even be critical, either, without sounding unpatriotic. It's why Peter Arnett got fired by NBC for speaking on Iraqi television. I'm patriotic but I wish our government would stop treating this war as if they had to sell it to us with slick advertising slogans. The White House Web site puts out a bulletin about the war with this headline: OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. Come on, all we want is the news, not a sales pitch. They called our bombing campaign against Baghdad "Shock and Awe." After the UN refused to approve the war, our government put together a list of countries it said supported us. They called it a "coalition of the willing." The generals don't talk about American soldiers. It's always "coalition forces." It's as if there were no Americans there. Reporters have been sucked into it, too. The word makes it sound as though we're just a few countries short of having the whole world on our side, and that isn't true. Most of the world is against us. The Administration says 49 countries are part of the coalition. I see that Eritrea, Uganda and Iceland are on our side. The fact is, though, we're in this thing with the British, who have 45,000 soldiers there, and the Australians, who have 2,000. That's it. The other 46 wish us well or let us fly bombers over their country. Big deal. We've practically bribed some of them. We offered Turkey $15 billion to let our troops go through there but they refused. President Bush won't be sending the president of Turkey anything for his birthday this year. There aren't any good wars, but this one is especially bad. We want to win it quickly without more death but we're grown-up people, too. The President, Rumsfeld and the generals ought to stop treating us like children. Tell us the truth. We can take it even when it's bad. And the only real good news will be when this terrible time in American history is over. Rooney: It's Just My Opinion NEW YORK, March 30, 2003 A weekly commentary by CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney. We all find war more interesting than peace. Any time death is imminent, life is exciting and we're watching this war as though it was a video game. On television, it's hard to know where to look to find what you want to know. There are pictures on top of pictures, moving print on top of those. There's more than the eye can see or the brain comprehend. The generals are giving us the play-by-play action from their Hollywood studio in Qatar. They're telling us everything, but we don't feel we know anything. Some reporters are attached to military units and we're getting stunning coverage from them. We're seeing war first hand. We're all asking each other what we think, too. Strangers ask me what I think as if I was smart because I'm on television. I have opinions - no information. Experts talk about precision bombing but on the ground, where bombs hit, it is not precise. People are killed, history destroyed. We didn't shock them and we didn't awe them in Baghdad. The phrase makes us look like foolish braggarts. The president ought to fire whoever wrote that for him. Just an opinion. We haven't caught bin Laden so we're transferring the blame for 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. There are soldiers who think that's why they're fighting. Hussein is a bad man who didn't have anything to do with 9/11. Just an opinion. When I see President Bush with soldiers, I wish he had been one at war himself. He'd know more about where he was sending those soldiers. Just an opinion. It bothers me that America is hated. I don't like to be hated personally - which happens - and I don't like my country to be hated - which has happened. I have one opinion I don't like having. We have stores of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in this country. If we were losing this war, would we, as a last resort, use them? I'm afraid we might. Hussein has chemical and biological weapons. If he is about to lose this war, will he use them? I'm afraid he might. I wish my America had never gotten into this war, but now that we're in it, I want us to win it.