Henri Reynard Speaks Out

Hitler's Surrogate?

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So it turns out Saddam was no Hitler surrogate in Iraq after all. In fact he was half a moustache short of matching even Mussolini in anything except terrorizing his own people. His military turned out to be the paper tiger that most of us hoped it would be, and his civilians fought for him only under the threat of his death squad loyalists. We walked into Baghdad nearly without effective opposition and even Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, was a virtual cakewalk compared to what some of our hawks had warned us might transpire there. Of course they spoke with a thousand voices in the days before the war in order to cover all of the high ground. The mission of some messages was to prepare us for easier victory than even the one we have had. Other messages were cautionary, warning of the dangers of street-to-street fighting and the capabilities of the Republican Guard. Thus we bombed the Republican Guard into the sands of history without any of our home guard Republicans having to admit that they were wrong about this war.

I would like to dance in the streets to celebrate this victory over an evil dictator, but I cannot. Not out of any misguided sympathy for Saddam. I harbor no such illusions about the essential goodness of man as to believe that anything but dead is his proper state. Nor is it particularly by the Iraqi people and their suffering that I am restrained in celebrating our victory. I am sorry that so many people had to suffer and die in this war but that alone would not keep me from celebrating a victory that I believed was honorable in a war that I believed was justified. I do believe that our troops behaved in an honorable fashion and even heroically in this war. I also believe that from a strictly military point of view they were as well led as any force in history. It is with the civilian oversight process, a process that failed in the period before this war, that I have a real and lasting problem. Our Commander in Chief is the civilian head of our military; our Congress is his balancing force in regard to declaring war. Both failed the people of this country miserably in the period prior to this war. The Administration failed this country by lying in pursuit of using this war to justify its misguided policy of preemptive war. The Congress abrogated their responsibility in regard to seriously reviewing the basis and justifications used to pursue this war.

There has been a lot of fine patriotic shifting about during this war and even more since it became evident that it was no challenge to defeat the Iraqi army for the second time. Evidently the sanctions imposed during the period between wars were successful in keeping the Iraqi army firmly in the last century of warfare. That made it easier for our far superior forces supported by far superior logistics and battlefield analysis to defeat the Iraqi's. Unfortunately this was a war founded in lies by our President and his advisors and an unbecoming weakness in those who comprise the all too loyal opposition. That simple fact does our nation no credit. Regardless of our victory we have behaved dishonorably one more time under the leadership of this simpering crew of propagandists and their apologists in the Congress. Our foreign policy reflects our internal politics more than at any other time in our recent history. It is an internal politics full of venom and self-justification and without the soundness of reasoned debate that is so desperately needed.

Both major parties are striking out willfully in pursuit of policies that will lock their constituencies ever closer, while tendering the olive branch only to the undecided middle. The upper hand in this death match is in the power of the President to set the agenda for the nation. Our current agenda internationally is clearly war until peace falls from a lack of opposition to the policy of Pax Americana. Our agenda domestically is to bankrupt the government in pursuit of a smaller government! That should be a joke! That it is a serious policy of the dominant party in our nation is tragic enough to keep me from celebrating anything for a long time. True patriotism is dead in this nation, and jingoism has taken its place. Self-serving leadership abounds in both parties and we are supposed to be celebrating a victory in a war that should never have been fought? We ought to be playing the funeral dirge for reason and sanity in our world. I feel like the asylum has expanded its boundaries to include the whole nation and is endangering the world with an irrational expansionism based in fear.

We fear terrorism less since we have shown that we can defeat a nation with less than ten percent of our population. We fear war less since we have shown that we can defeat a nation with less than three percent of our productive capacity. We ought to be afraid of our leadership; they are bankrupting us, economically, morally and spiritually. We ought to be afraid of where they are taking us; these leaders of ours. We must also understand that celebration should be reserved for victories that were honorably pursued as a means to seeking peace. We must not celebrate this victory as a means of justifying further war.