| I finally gave in and pulled myself away from the NCAA tournament to check in on the "war" in Iraq. I use the term "war" since, by all accounts, Iraq's military ranks somewhere between the kids who built a snowfort down the street from me and the local NRA chapter. Anyway, I was flipping between the various announcers, somber enough to be politically correct but not enough to detract from the somewhat obvious fact that they were just reading from a teleprompter, and as I watched a false note crept in.
It took me a good while to figure out exactly what the problem was - finally, as I listened to Tom Brokaw call for a slight break, I noticed what it was. They hadn't really made reference to what we're actually doing. Do people really understand what this is? People say they support the president, they say they trust in our government, they say that war is "necessary" to remove the evil one from power... but nobody seems to have fleshed out exactly what that means, beyond the fancy night vision and occaisional flash in the dark symbolizing the obliteration of a building complex somewhere in the emptiness of a once quiet desert. Let's look, in very bald terms, what we are doing right now. Missiles tipped with high explosives are fired from floating cities in the Gulf, and go whistling through the air and land in an eruption of rock, steel and fire. Aircraft travelling beyond the speed of sound are destroying "strategic" military points, like water treatment facilities. People don't even hear these things coming until the walls are suddenly moving towards them at a strangely accelerated pace. Troops are advancing with tubes of steel capable of projecting shards of metal at thousands of feet per second into other men, shredding whatever it hits. We're butchering innocent people becuase we want to "save" them. Oh, and their oil. I think people need some perspective on these things. The closest most people alive now have gotten to war is watching reruns of M*A*S*H. I sincerely believe we need to reinstitute a long-lost vestige of war from Sparta. We need to start sending our congressmen and president to war. Bush dodged the draft in the Texas Air Nat'l guard, right? He should definitely be able to fly missions over Iraq. A good number of senators have military experience - why not just recomission them? On top of that, why not mandate that when we go to war, any senator voting for war who has children is required to send them over? I suggest we'd have a lot fewer "peacekeeping" missions where we overthrow a popular government to force political choice on people. That is, unless senators really are that cold hearted, and really would kill their own children for another $1,000,000 campaign contribution, something I certainly would not put past them. cranked out at 9:01 PM | |
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