Here We Go Again

[FightingIrish]

When I watched the television coverage of the first air strikes on Baghdad in March of 2003, I was horrified and dismayed. Even though I had fought for months against this invasion, it still seemed to me that were going after a monster. The idea that we were killing innocent people did not really sink in until we saw the first bodies in the rubble. The Bush administration had done such a good job of personalizing the war that it really did seem for a moment that our objective was to take out an evil dictator.

The pattern is unfolding again with Iran. The non-stop Ahmadinejadamania has been staged for one purpose, to condition us to hate a symbol of the country our government wants to invade. Even though he is not the real ruler of Iran, his careless rhetoric has made him the likely target for the transference of our collective distrust of a people we scarcely understand. At he same time the Bush administration is demonizing the man, they are insuring that his popularity in Iran will keep him exactly where he is until he has served our purpose.

Although the Neocon agenda is years behind schedule, it is moving forward again with monotonous precision. We are already seeing the seemingly innocuous and hollow resolutions in Congress that will be the precursors to unlawful military action. Later we will learn that behind the charade of patient diplomacy the war machine was already gaining unstoppable momentum. We couldn’t let the U.N. inspectors do their job in Iraq because the hot weather was approaching and our soldiers were getting antsy. Now the real urgency is the likelihood of a Democratic administration that will want nothing to do with bush’s bloody legacy and the dreams of Neocon madmen. Once our troops are thrown into the new meat grinder however, any talk of peace will again be treason. Maybe we will get used to the repeated pattern of invasion and occupation that the people of Nazi Germany passively accepted as their destiny.