First off, to say that America is going to war against Iraq is a bunch of horseshit.

In the coming weeks, the leaders of our country will, very likely, empower the military to attack Iraq. This means that a group of young men with high-tech weaponry will drop bombs and fire bullets at a vastly overmatched army, and, inevitably, at thousands of innocent civilians, who, by their own poor fortune, happen to live in Iraq. Most Americans will watch the Pentagon’s approved video feeds on CNN and listen to the sober pronouncements of the anchormen and tell themselves: we are at war!

But they won’t be at war. They’ll be sitting snug in their heated homes, with their children safely tucked into bed with a fridge full of food and a couple of excellent vehicles in the driveway, watching other people die. That is not war, and it dishonors those people on earth — including our very own citizens — who have endured the grave sacrifices of an actual war.

Now: I’m not going to sit here and make some half-baked plea for pacifism. Saddam Hussein is a murderous despot and — like most of the Arab world — a virulent anti-Semite, and he was all these things 20 years ago, when American leaders were helping him establish his dictatorship. It is certainly possible that he will lash out, if allowed to develop weapons of mass destruction (though more likely at Israel than at America). That is what the Bush administration would like us to believe, and I’m not going to pretend to know otherwise.

But I, for one, am getting good and tired of watching a draft-dodging, failed oil executive — who ascended to the presidency through the most vile, undemocratic judicial chicanery in the history of our nation — frame the debate. Is there not one brave person in all of Congress who will stand up and call a spade a spade? Bush is pushing for this war, in part, because the economy is in the crapper, his tax cuts have drained the federal surplus accrued during the Clinton administration, and he has no idea what to about it.

If the attacks of September 11 taught us anything, it’s that Americans are viewed by much of the developing world as greedy bullies. Bush’s war-mongering only reinforces that impression. His foreign policy — to dignify that term — is a monumental failure of imagination.

This is the precise moment in world history when America needs to step up to its challenges morally — not through brute intimidation, but by devising a more rational response to our new role as the lone superpower. That begins by realizing that we are, to a greater extent than anyone ever dares to say, greedy bullies. We continue to hog most of the planet’s resources and to treat the rest of the world as client states whose most useful role is to supply us with cheap goods and labor.

Rather than leading the effort to conserve our dwindling natural resources — not just oil, but clean air and water — the Bush administration has rolled back environmental regulations and sought to turn the Alaskan wilderness into a petroleum free-for-all. Rather than declaring war on world poverty, we’ve chosen to accept that might makes right, that we can send our boys overseas to kick some towelhead ass and that will make us all safe in our SUVs.

What amazes me isn’t that George W. Bush would seek to sell us this feeble and shortsighted brand of logic, but that the good and decent citizens of this country are so morally listless that they buy it.

Wake up, people. Only murderers cheer for death.

Back to the Thoughts on going to war index.