While the US plays cowboy with Iraq, going in guns blazing all hell-bent-for-leather, someone within the country has a head cool enough for thinking: A muslim woman.
Read: US out, UN in. It makes more sense than Washington.
(Sing along, you know the tune…)
Happy Day,
Chasing the Lies away.
On my way to where the Prez got beat –
Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Downing Street?
John Kerry chickened out of his promise to bring the Downing Street Memo to light in congress. John Conyers – what a trooper – took the torch and went to the White House gate and found them locked. Imagine: the White house closed against a Government official being unwelcome in the White House! It’s not like this is a private residence!
Undeterred, Representative Conyers held a news conference to speak of the issue. In his own words, this it how the Republicans tried to counter his move:
Despite desperate attempts by Republicans to disrupt the proceedings, 32 Members of Congress attended this hearing. We were forced to use a cramped room in the basement of the Capitol little bigger than a closet, even though plenty of larger hearing rooms were available. The Republican Leadership also scheduled votes for nearly two straight hours in an unprecedented attempt to limit the ability of Democratic Members of Congress to participate in this hearing.
Thanks to your help, and the more than 560,000 individuals who signed this letter, the mainstream media felt compelled to cover this event. The room was packed with television cameras and there was significant coverage in national newspapers and radio networks. After the hearing I hand delivered the list of signatures along with a letter to the president signed by 122 Members of Congress demanding answers, and led a rally outside the White House.
This makes me curious; why the devious tactics if this memo, as the right would have us believe, is no big deal? It seems their actions belie their words.
What the Republican Party knows is now being revealed: George W. Bush has been dreaming of finishing his father’s war for years.
“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said, ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He went on, ‘If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”
Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military “win” under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush’s father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.
Herskowitz’s revelations illuminate Bush’s personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.
I’d like to take this chance to coin a phrase: “Cowboy Envy” to underscore how childish and irresponsible this type of thinking is. To imperil American soldiery for a childish, middle-school dream of being a successful president is unfitting for an elected official. This is like growing up dreaming of having three banks, because daddy has only one; It’s like a child wanting to push the Big Red Button at an ICBM silo farm – absolutely no thought to consequences.
Like a Crawford cowboy
Riding out on a tank in a bomb-splattered desert town
Like a Crawford cowboy
Sending regret letters to people I have let down
And I just look sad and frown…
(Fess up. You know this one, too.)