Title: OT:FW: Are you Nuts?
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From: "Pete Kessenich" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 14:09:33 -0500
Subject: Are you Nuts?
Hesselberg:
How low can we go?
Invade Iraq? 6:28 PM 9/02/02
George Hesselberg Wisconsin State Journal
I have read a lot of flabbergasting articles about Sept. 11 and its aftermath in the past 11 months, but one paragraph in the paper last week brought the bar to its lowest.
A poll by Knight Ridder "indicated that most Americans are gung-ho for the global war on terrorism and a solid 67 percent favor taking it to Iraq."
Nope. Close, but that's not the paragraph.
It was this one: "The poll results reflect some confusion about the war on terrorism, a conflict with shifting boundaries and elusive enemies. Nearly one-third of Americans view the entire Muslim world as the enemy, even though several Muslim countries support the U.S. war effort."
The question this presents is: What?
Well, what do you expect in a country where it sometimes appears government is using a Marx Brothers movie script as a template.
Where it sometimes appears Homeland Security should be renamed "Homeland Paranoia."
Where the economic policy resembles in sincerity and record-keeping a Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker telethon.
Where the media seem to spend more money printing fast-fading flags and producing flag-waving promotions than on researching and reporting the actual degradation of rights, even the dissolution of rights, among citizens.
Doesn't it seem as if the government is wasting billions and billions of dollars on unnecessary or unworkable "security" - an exercise that reminds me of a raccoon attracted to anything that sparkles? Doesn't it seem as if we are botching chance after chance to prove to the world that the United States, in the face of a potential threat, can still assure equal justice under the law?
Isn't it odd that government leadership is so rabidly intent on invading Iraq that it appears more attention is being paid to overthrowing a nation's psyche (our own) by zealous public relations than accumulating any solid evidence such an invasion is necessary?
tShouldn't we be a little worried when airport security has turned into an exercise in how best to amass eyebrow scissors and nail files, and detain and humiliate non-white travelers?
We wait and wait for someone in charge to ask: Invade Iraq? Are you nuts?
We wait and wait for the media to stop showing deference and start showing some defiance.
You want to send soldiers to Iraq? Didn't we do that already? Is it a measure of cynicism if we think that this is an attempt to take everyone's attention away from endemic regulator-ignored corporate criminality?
Or to keep people from noticing that a human-rights-stomping religious fanatic may be running the Justice Department?
Would it be a stretch to use adjectives such as mind-numbingly inept, politically bankrupt, or intellectually vacuous in describing American foreign policy, a policy seemingly cribbed from a collection of Little Golden Books?
More damning, perhaps, is the thought that it's nearly a year later and the administration is still looking not for justice, but for blood revenge, a lust fueled by intentionally vague or false information and a desire to rewrite the Constitution, in secret.
Who knew, a year ago, that a policy of building generations of hate, so cultivated by the terrorists as necessary to perpetuate blind acceptance of an evil goal, would gain a foothold in the threshold of democracy, too?
Reach George Hesselberg at 252-6140, or at the Wisconsin State Journal, P.O. Box 8058, Madison, WI 53708 or at [EMAIL PROTECTED] dent
