Lately, I've been thinking about all these war hawks who support the Iraqi invasion. The great thing about these guys which I have mentioned before and which works to their advantage, is that they have so many different justifications for the war. Like if, say, you ask someone, hey man, where are all those WMDs you guys were talkin' about, and he'll say fuck you, I supported the war not to find weapons, but 'cause I had a nagging itch in my prostate for freeing the Iraqi masses from Saddam's tyranny and giving 'em a taste of good old-fashioned Western democracy. Then you ask someone else, my friend, if you're such a democracy freak, how do you feel about handing the country over to a fundamentalist Islamic regime that's gonna be as supportive of human rights as your wife's gonna be of you having an affair? And he'll say, oh, but Iraqi democracy never had a place in my war manifesto, I supported the Iraqi invasion so that we could fight terrorists over there instead of here. And so on and so forth.
What no one appears to have noticed till now is how all these various pro-war justifications are fundamentally incompatible with each other. For example, consider the farmer in Asscrack, Mississippi who wants to fight terrorists in Iraq 'cause that will keep 'em too occupied to fly planes into his barn. And contrast him with the stockbroker from Westchester, New York, who is pro-war because of his passion for bestowing a peaceful democratic Iraq unto its residents. If you think about this for a minute, you'll recognize that there's just no way for a scenario to exist where the objectives of both these gentlemen could be achieved simultaneously.
In order to create a so-called "flypaper zone" for terrorists to get sucked into, it follows that this would entail keeping Iraq in a perpetual state of destabilization and war, allowing its borders to be porous enough to soak in terrorists from Syria and Iran and all those other axes of evil in order to occupy their attentions there, thus keeping the rest of the world safe from their machinations. On the other hand, if a peaceful Iraq were to be ultimately established, couldn't that be construed to be a failure of the "fight them over there instead of over here" objective? 'Cause if you want to keep those bastards occupied, wouldn't you want the war in Iraq to continue unmitigated, year after year after year, the insurgency to carry on as it is, or exacerbate? Wouldn't every car bombing, every beheaded corpse denote success in the war?
And after realizing this, shouldn't Westchester stockbroker guy, who's such a sucker for Iraqi progress, step up to the plate and say, hey man, what the fuck, your dream of a never-ending war in Iraq is in direct conflict with my goal of a peaceful democracy in that country. But do you see anyone saying that? Heck, no. In reality, we see both these warmonkeys making sweet love on the same bed even though one of them wants to have babies and raise a family, while the other is trying to remember who the fuck he's gonna be sleeping with tomorrow.
Next, consider the justification for the war which involves turning Iraq into a democracy. And contrast that with the goal of making Iraq a terrorist-free zone. Looks like Iraq might actually soon be a democracy, although it will be ruled by a fundamentalist Islamic government at the center. So can this goal of democracy co-exist with that of making Iraq terrorism-free? Not really, if you look at how the fundamentalist Taliban government led to the rise of Al Qaida in Afghanistan. See what I mean? Again, two mutually exclusive goals.
Which is why it amazes me when George W. Bush calmly uses a number of these different justifications for the Iraq war in the same breath, which are quite obviously incompatible with each other, and then expects everyone to believe in the honesty of his mission. That he can say he wants to fight terrorists over there instead of over here, and then, at the same time, explain that the war is all about bringing peace and stability and democracy to the Middle-East. This is just ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. And I am even more astonished that no one has called him on this nonsense yet.
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