The House That Zelmo Built

"To expose and humiliate the Errorists, the American Errorists, we'll start with one
I know just one, the war has begun" ~ NOFX


Bush Seeks Money, Support for Iraq Effort


Dubya. You've gotta love the bastard. For one, he's a Texan, which earns him stupid points heading right out of the gates (hey, I'm an Alaskan. It's my sworn duty to make fun of the residents of Little Texas). And another reason, he's the master of the backpedalling technique.

Remember back in February and March, when war with Iraq was an obvious certainty? When the Dubya Administration had decided months before that U.N. jurisdiction regarding the whole matter was (rightly so) an afterthought at best? Remember how the Dubya Administration shrewdly and deftly managed to destroy all but the most important foreign relations bridges built by the previous Clinton Administration as well as Daddy Bush's Administration and those from the Reaganomics Era, and subsequently isolate the U.S. into its current stance as the lone wolf on top of a mountainous hill of political pigshit? The entire world hated us now.....well, if you consider the entire world to be France, Germany, North Korea, and the Middle East. Most of the other major players in the world saw a good fight brewing and chose to grab a seat and a couple of brewskies and bowls of popcorn, along with a few buddies, and watch the action unfold.

What followed next was, obviously, Operation Iraqi Freedom. A fine display of U.S. military might, which is mandatory every 10 years or so (or whenever a Republican is in the White House, take your pick), to remind the world that America is not to be fucked with, lest you suffer the consequences. The invasion itself was a military walk in the park; when the fighting was over and done with during the invasion part, we had more troops die from fucking traffic accidents and helicopter crashes than we did from actual gunbattle.

And during that whole time, the Dubya Administration's (rightly so) Fuck The United Nations Campaign was blazing along at a grand and extremely admirable pace. Our invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power had proven successful. Our victory in Iraq had been rubbed in the faces of the entire U.N. Security Council, the Frogs, the Krauts, and those conniving Russkies. Iraq now belonged to America, along with all of the spoils that came with it.

And then....we fucked up. Somehow, a partisan conglomerate had managed to take hold of the center of the country and wage guerrila warfare against our troops, which must have been considerably hard to do, since Dubya had declared the war as "over". And though our boys were only dying at a rate of one or two a day, it was the daily regularity of those deaths that had people back home all pissed off and worrying about their loved ones that were stationed over there. Because whether it was intentional or not, those one or two deaths per day committed by the partisan forces in Iraq had more of a drastic effect on the American psyche than the weekly body counts of dead American soldiers during the Vietnam War ever did. Because the human mind naturally tends to become indifferent to numbers that are too large for it to comprehend mentally. When 2 men die, it's a very sad thing indeed. When 57 men die, well darn....that sucks, now how are my stocks doing?

I believe Josef Stalin said it best when he stated, "One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is merely a statistic."

Now I've heard people say that Iraq is going to turn into our generation's very own Vietnam War, and in a way, they were right. But they are wrong when it comes to the scale of our Neo-Vietnam in the Middle East. Due to our military's advanced technology and training in that technology, the number of American deaths in Iraq will never come close to the meat grinder that was Vietnam. And while both our occupation of Iraq and the Vietnam War are similar in their objectives, of winning the hearts and minds of the people that live(d) there, that is where the similarities end. Because while the Vietnam War was all about preventing a Communist spread into Southeast Asia, Operation Iraqi Freedom was all about "getting Saddam".

So in a sense, one war was fighting an idea, while the other war was about fighting one specific person. The majority of the Iraqi people know this, too. They may not know much of anything about our war in Vietnam, but they do know, in general, that we were sent there to take out Saddam. And while the majority of Iraqis may not like us gallivanting around their country shooting at every Fedayeen or Saddam sympathizer that moves (and frankly, who can blame them? How would you like it if some foreign army were running around America hunting for a Dubya-on-the-run, and accidentally blew up your buddy's house in the process), they do know that they have a lot more freedoms now than they did under Saddam Hussein. Of course, that little thing called "security" is highly overrated, isn't it? ;-)

Which is why that, in the end, the whole Iraqi mess will not escalate into another Vietnam War. Our troops will continue to die a soldier or two at a time, picked off daily or every other day, until our mission there is done. Whenever that day will be. In time, their lives will be forgotten except by those that knew them and/or loved them. Such is the tragic part of war; in the grand scheme of things, as a soldier you're really not making that much of a difference, at least nothing that you'll ever be given any real credit for personally.

Which finally brings me to Dubya's kow-towing to the U.N. earlier today. You know, I supported Bush prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom and during its whole progression. But as if on cue, the Dubya Administration took a good thing and fucked it all up. It's like the Dubya Administration scored the first touchdown of the game, and then decided then that the game was over even though they still had 3 quarters left to go.

For starters, none of our troops should have been sent home after the war was officially declared over....in fact, that was Dubya's first mistake; you can't call a war "over" when more troops have died during the occupation than there were during the actual invasion, you dumb fuckin' Texan. In fact, more troops should have been committed to the Gulf region in order to secure our victory, not less. And rather than allowing "business as usual" to continue in the U.S., a grand rationing campaign should have taken place with the goal of making Americans spend less on shit that they didn't need, like gas for trips to nowhere, food that our nation's collective assortment of fatasses didn't need to eat in the first place, etc. Because such a move would have actually helped the economy in the long run, because this is how war economies develop money to finance a war, and also why war economies tend to be more healthy than peacetime economies. And quite frankly, trying to finance a war in a peacetime economy is simply fucking stupid.

Had Dubya done all of that, he would not be forced to suck the Big U.N. Dick right now, begging for support. Because now our economy is in a shambles; an overweight, bloated yet slowly dying, beached whale that still has plenty of life left in it, but not much hope in the long run so long as it continues to lay on the beach not doing anything to get itself back in the water, while the sun slowly dries it out to death. Our military power in Iraq has been cut by 1/3; 130,000 U.S. troops deployed is not enough to police a country with a population of 24 million. Our fellow Americans living Stateside are getting disillusioned about our economy and the need to finance not one, not two, but three wars; the War-That-Isn't-Really-A-War-But-Is In Iraq, the War On Terror that lives on in Afghanistan, and the Korean War (remember, the war against North Korea was never officially declared as over, and they still have nukes just itching to be used against us). And now Iran is telling the U.N. to fuck off, or face "unexpected consequences" in the future if the U.S. and U.N. doesn't back off from Iran's nuclear program.

Steps need to be taken in this country of ours, starting with the economy and moving up from there. A wartime economy has never been enacted in this country, and it needs to be enacted soon if we have any hope of turning Iraq into the democracy puppet that we want it to be. More troops need to be deployed overseas to ensure it to happen; if a draft is necessary, so be it. Because the only way to enforce a War On Terror is to commit every fighting man to the field.

Would I go? Would I join the military and take up the fight? I would if I had to. A draft is not a bad idea, and should definitely be considered by Congress and our President since Al Qaida has declared war on all Americans. That includes you and your next door neighbor, your family, your wife, your children, even your fucking dog. There are forces in this world that would like nothing better than to see you and thousands like you die, all for their bullshit and bastardized version of Allah.

If it's a war that we're fighting, then our country needs to fucking treat it like one, instead of fighting it half-assed with a military force not even a tenth of the size that was deployed to stop the Axis Powers in World War II. Because when you put it all into context, 130,000 troops are now deployed in Iraq. Compare that to 114,000 American troops that died in the Italian Campaign alone during World War II, and you can see that our generation knows nothing about sacrifices. All we care about is the prices at the pump and getting a good deal from Sprint.

We are at war. It's good to be an American.