The One With Aldacron

Recently, someone posted a comment to my post entitled More Cartoon Spawned Violence. I started to type up a reply comment to focus on a couple of points the writer made, but I decided to make a new blog entry instead since I have rather a lot to say. Regarding my opinion that the Bush administration is to blame for the explosiveness in the Muslim world:

I would be inclined to agree with you here, but if not for the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans supported Bush’s actions immediately after 9/11. Arguements can be made that Bill Clinton is at fault too, and so is Israel and just about everybody else.

I can understand this point of view. Obviously, many Americans did support Bush after 9/11. Many supported the invasion of Iraq. I was one of them. One of my English students at the time was a Samsung Electronics VP who was in charge of cell phone sales in the Latin American market. In the lead up to the Iraq invasion, he and I had many debates on the motives behind the accusations. He was firmly entrenched in the common Korean view that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld were looking to control Iraq’s oil. I couldn’t understand how such an intelligent man could go for such a conspiracy theory. I was defending the need to invade Iraq because I believed what my president was telling me. The possibility that Iraq’s weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists posed a huge threat to the US. The alleged links to Al Qaeda enhanced that threat and made it seem that much more urgent.

I can’t say I believe Bush was solely seeking control of Iraq’s oil, but whatever his true motives I now know that my faith was misplaced. That man misled us all. Some people point at faulty intelligence and claim that he never lied. But with some research we can find hints that plans to invade Iraq were in motion long before the WMD intelligence came to light. This is the ultimate betrayal. It goes well beyond Nixon’s Watergate, or Clinton’s lying under oath about Lewinsky. The invasion of Iraq has cost over 2,000 American deaths and countless others already. It has been a catalyst for Muslim extremists to ignite anger and gain new recruits. It has been used as an example of American ‘Imperialism’ by radical Imams and rogue dictators. It has raised the stakes in the war on terror and increased the danger to Americans around the world. And when you throw in all that has happened since – the torture of prisoners, the violations of prisoners’ rights, missile attacks on ‘suspected terrorist’ gatherings that always kill innocents (regardless of how many terrorists are actually killed) – it all paints a perfect picture for the extremists to use in support of their cause. This is why I blame Bush. Even Muslims who are not extremists surely have had a slowly boiling rage, anger that they kept bottled up.

So why not blame Clinton? Why not blame Israel? We can go back 40 years and place the blame on every US administration that has worked in the White House in that time. Our policies in the Middle East have always focused squarely on American interests and ignored the consequences. Our government has never been sympathetic to the idea of Muslim theocracy. Our activists have never been sympathetic to the idea of religion before freedom. In the Middle East, America has been perceived as a bully and, to extremists, an enemy for many years. But the extremist view never really caught on outside of the idealist crowd. Sure, there were flag burnings in Iran 25 years ago. And the first Gulf War gave Osama bin Laden what he needed to give Al Qaeda a bit of momentum. But Muslim extremism, while a threat, was never an ideal of the majority.

America had the sympathy of Muslims around the world after 9/11. What normal Muslim could condone such an act of violence against innocents? With the correct response, Osama bin Laden could have been made more of a pariah than he already was. Afghanistan should have become the focus of the War on Terror. They were harboring terrorists. They were oppressing their people. The terrorist training camps were real. The justification for the invasion of Afghanistan was no lie. Ultimately, the people were happy to be liberated. But we only sent 11,000 troops to do the job. Could we have caught bin Laden at Tora Bora if we’d had more troops? No one can say definitively, of course, but I’m pretty sure we could have.

So if we take a trip back in time through news reports, interviews with current and former administration officials, interviews with government officials from coalition countries (the UK in particular), a puzzle can be pieced together. Afghanistan was a delaying action. We went there because we had to. Bush needed time to build a case that could justify an invasion of Iraq. That case was built from the fear Americans felt after 9/11. The idea of WMD going from Iraq to Al Qaeda is a terrifying one. And to make sure the threat stayed fresh, the threat level color code was regularly raised. How many times did CNN report that local law enforcement officials learned of the raised threat levels the same way the rest of us did (through the news)? How many times was the threat level raised prior to the invasion of Iraq? How many times has it been raised since? It was just another case of the Bush government manipulating popular opinion so that they could garner support for their planned invasion of Iraq when the time came. Diplomacy was never really on the table.

This is why I blame the Bush government for the Muslim rage being displayed aroud the world. The actions of the United States government since 9/11 have done more damage to Muslim-West relations than anything in the 40 years prior. He betrayed and manipulated the people who elected him to office so that he could pursue his own peronal agenda. The American soldiers dying in Iraq are doing so not in the defense of freedom, but in the pursuit of Bush’s goals. I served in the Army from 1990-1994, but if I were serving now I would be more angry than proud. I understand that some soldiers really believe they are doing something good for the Iraqi people by helping them to build a democracy, and for the people back home by “keeping the terrorists in Iraq”. I don’t want to belittle them at all. But I do feel that they have been deceived. It’s hard to see clearly when you want to believe you are doing what is just and right. Ultimately though, the occupation is now just more fuel for the extremist fire and has never been about what Bush said it was about.

What’s the point? These issues will allways be debated, and debated,
and debated……. Honestly Im tired of hearing about it. Who’s
right….who’s wrong….well it depends on who you ask, and you may get
a different answer every time.

I’m tired of it, too, but it isn’t going to just go away. There was a time when I cared nothing for politics. I didn’t care who won the presidential elections, or what they said on TV. I wasn’t interested in debates on policy or the ramifications of the latest government debacle. That all changed in 2000 with the fiasco surrounding the presidential election. I strongly believed Gore should have won. For the first time, I actually took an interest in the system. The logic of Bush winning even though Gore had the popular vote was lost on me. This led me to learn about the electoral college, and to form my opinion that it no longer has a place in today’s world of instant communication. On policy issues, I used to consider myself an independent. I had always believed that what’s right for the nation cannot be summarized in a party platform and that decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis.

To make a long story short, the events of the last several years have caused me to realize that I am neither independent nor moderate. I’m far to the left on most issues. More importantly, I now believe that participating in public debate on government and politics is a basic foundation of democracy. If we didn’t talk about who is right or wrong, then the government would always do what they believe is right and be damned what the people think. With the Bush administration, that debate is doubly important because they are doing what they think is right and the people be damned anyway.

In the first term of the Bush government, post-9/11, the administration formed public opinion. I’ve always believed Bill Clinton is a great orator and has an amazing talent for persuasion. Bush is certainly not a great orator and his skill of persuasion is sorely lacking. But the Bush administration as a whole is a finely-oiled spin machine, with Karl Rove at the heart of it. They can take any situation, spin it, and sell it to the lowest common demoninator quite deftly. The average American does not do the research to back up what the president says. They take it at face value, perhaps tempered by their life experience. But they don’t go digging through archives looking for speeches or interviews made in the past that counter what is said today. They don’t look around to verify the numbers the government doles out when talking about budgets and taxes, or dig through charts and graphs to see what the numbers really mean. They don’t try to find the misdirections, quotes taken out of context, or half-truths that many politicians use to attack their opponents and their opponents’ positions, or to defend their own. Hell, most people don’t even know what rights the consitution really gives them (nowhere, and I mean nowhere, does the constitution give us the right to own a gun), much less what authority it gives the president. That’s the lowest common demoninator that the Bush machine aims to manipulate. Fortunately, that ability has been hampered in the second term. The administration has been damaged by one setback after another and their credibility has taken a beating.

It’s very important that this debate continue. I feel very strongly that Bush has abused his authority as president, overstepped his bounds, and betrayed the American people. While I would love to see him impeached, I don’t particularly enjoy the thought of Cheney taking the reins (though it’s debatable that he doesn’t have the reins in hand already), but ultimately if any crimes have been committed someone needs to take responsibility. This debate needs to continue so that when the next administration takes office we can talk about what went wrong, how not to do it again, and how to fix what is broken. This debate needs to continue so that people don’t forget. We need to know the truth, but it’s not going to come out until the Bush administration leaves office (and probably not for a long time after). This debate needs to continue so that people on both sides become motivated to stand up and vote in each election. A population that isn’t debating is complacant, and a complacant population will eventually find themselves being led by someone they don’t want rather than someone that is simply tolerable.

I have been ineligible to vote for many years now because I have not been back in the States long enough to establish residency. This year, that’s going to change. I now have a position, I now want to debate and try to bring people around to my point of view. This is something I’m not going to quit even when Bush is gone, no matter how tired of it I may become. I had been complacant, but Bush is the leader I can’t tolerate. That has galvanized me to speak out against what I see as crimes against the American people.