Wednesday, April 30th marked the 5 year anniversary of Commander W. Codpiece strutting onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln with a big, shiny new red, white and blue banner hanging in the background with the words "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!" emblazoned across it. And the conservative right-wing Bush sycophants cooed with amorous admiration at the manliness of the cocky little man from Crawford, Texas -- a little man whom they now profferred to the world as a figure who was part God, part action-hero, and part brilliant statesman.
On December 7, 1941, the empire of Japan launched a surprise raid on the United States naval station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii setting in motion America's involvement in the second world war - aka WWII. On August 15, 1945, 3 months after Italy and Germany surrendered in the European war theater, Japan, reeling from the horrific devastation wrought from the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, also finally surrendered.
So, in approximately 3 years and 8 months the United States and it's allies managed to decisively defeat several then world-class military powers, who had already conquered a goodly portion of Europe and southeast Asia, and restored the hope and promise of Democracy to millions of repressed people around the world. 3 years and 8 months! It bears repeating.
Yet hear we are, 5+ years into the shitty little Iraq conflict, with no end in sight, no viable political solution on the horizon, violence and military and civilian casualty levels on the increase once again (showing the utter, and predictable, folly of the Bush/Petraeus surge), $1 trillion in taxpayer funds wasted (that's a thousand $billion for you math flunkers), and, apparently, an embarrassingly inept ability to wrap up this bloody horror show and take our toys and go home.
There's an old saying -- "the passage of time heals all wounds" and I suppose depending on the gravity of the wound it's generally a truthful statement. With America's military mis-adventures in Mesopotamia I submit to you that the passage of time also adversely affects people's memories and their ability to learn lessons from previous mistakes. I refer to our last long-term military foray on foreign soil -- the Vietnam war. I was just a kid when that conflict was ravaging the moral fabric of our society and chalking up death-toll numbers which would result in a memorial wall of shame in our nation's capital. I remember some of the effects of that idiocy on my family -- an uncle who came back from Vietnam and 6 months after --dressed himself up in his Marines dress uniform, drove his car into a wooded area behind his apartment, put on his white gloves, climbed into the back seat and put a bullet into his own brain. I was just a kid at the time, but I remember the hushed conversations at the wake about the "awfulness" of the Vietnam war. If only more had spoken out openly then, perhaps my uncle would be alive today.
Bottom line is --- this generation has forgotten the stupidity of the Vietnam lesson. We hide our heads in the sand thinking that the same people who had their hands in the Vietnam pot, could somehow now be trusted to deal with another international crisis in an intelligent and diplomatically feasible manner.
The Bushistas are the Nixonites redux --- read up on it if you have the guts and the fortitude to do so. And as Nixon's forays into criminal adventurism doomed his Presidency and the Republican party, Bush's transgressions, in a sane world, ought to be the precedent setting example of why a nation should forcefully remove an elected leader from office and humiliate all those elected officials who supported his transgressions.
The picture of the ( now deceased ) Marine at the head of this post is my justification for stating --- BRING OUR GUYS AND GALS HOME NOW! This country does not need any more Merlin Germanys. If you have an issue with this, please e-mail me -- i'm interested to hear your side of the story.
----krazee
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