Bush and the art of war

If there are any of my readers who are extra-sensitive, in that you cannot stomach criticism of any kind for whatever work you produce, be brave. For, while the ability to make correct decisions is a positive boon to most professions, it has become completely unnecessary in the field of American foreign policy. And it is this field I would recommend to you, my paranoid fellow citizens.

Take the matter of war, for example. Ask anyone what the most serious decision-making aspect of foreign policy is, and you might be told it is the question of whether or not to go to war. When such a decision must be made, it should be made after having exhausted every effort to avoid war, and if a war must be fought, then the decision to fight it must be based on good and accurate intelligence, since war involves such wholesale destruction and death, to both military personnel and to civilians unlucky enough to be too close to the theater of operation. Also there is the question of the cost of a major war, which, in most cases, is enough to cause serious economic hardships to even the richest of countries.

But when a decision was made by the Bush administration to go to war in Iraq, none of this mattered. No one from Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks, which were said to have been the precipitating events that obliged us to go to war there in the first place. No intelligence supported such a theory, but this did not bother our policy makers. To make up for the lack of such intelligence, they invented a meeting that supposedly took place between unnamed members of the Iraqi government and some Al-Qaida operatives.

And as for the other excuses used to get us involved in this quagmire? Well, if inventiveness is handy in one area, it can be handy in other areas as well. For instance, according to those responsible for getting this war off the ground, we suddenly were faced with an Iraq that posed a credible threat to both the U. S. and any number of its allies abroad. In other words, instead of accurately reading available intelligence and then reaching a decision, a decision was made, and intelligence was then created to support it.

And when it becomes apparent that the war started to avenge the death of some 3800 people in this country is being waged needlessly in a country that had nothing to do with it, and that, in hindsight, we see that we were stampeded into this war that has cost the lives of over 100,000 Iraqi citizens, instead of ooh-ing, aah-ing, er-ing or but-ing your way out of it, you stand tall, and refuse to accept even the remotest possibility that you may have been mistaken. No, you go on, and repeat the fallacies that you used to get your war started to begin with, and if you must accept that you took the nation to war under false pretenses, come back with that trite question/answer- “Yes, but can anyone really say that we are not better off now that Saddam is out of power?”-because, after all, most people have probably forgotten the roles that many of the current administration played in helping Saddam take power when they worked for President Reagan.

And when the war refuses to die down after you have declared that all major military operations are at an end, even then you do not have to admit any fault. No, do as your Commander-in-Chief did during the heat of the last election. When asked during one of the debates to name his most costly miscues, President Bush looked puzzled for a bit, then admitted that the only time he had been wrong during his first administration was when he thought once that he had been mistaken.

In fact, you can take this a bit farther, and emulate your second in command, Vice President Dick Cheney. For, according to Brother Dick, not only are we doing the right thing in Iraq, we now have the bad guys breathing their last. And even when you are contradicted by one of the leading Generals in the war, you can pay as much attention to him as you once did to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In short, this type of foreign policy can be termed the “General Jack D. Ripper Doctrine”. General Ripper, as many movie buffs know, was the mad General in the classic black and white movie “Dr. Strangelove” who sent his B-52’s over the Soviet Union to start WW III. To his superiors, he reported, (I paraphrase) “I know this isn’t something that you would have wanted, but make no mistake about it, the war is on. My boys will give you the best kind of head start, so get going, and good luck.”

And remember, as love means never having to say you’re sorry, so being a foreign policy expert means never having to say you’re wrong.