Since There's No Reward, Can We Give Back The Risk?

So it's finally come to this. The Bush administration is now asking... No, the Bush administration never asks. It is insisting that the armed forces of the world come into Iraq and clean up the mess we made. A pathetic Reuters propaganda story features our fighting boys and their plaintive calls for help, along with an effort to shame other countries into participating, which reads like it came right off the desk of Karl Rove. "It's time the rest of the world gave us a little reinforcement. We're paying for too much of this." said one soldier. "I think a lot of people want to come over here and help us but they can't. For political reasons, their country is not sending them," said another.

For political reasons? What motivated us to go there in the first place? We invaded the country against the expressed wishes of the rest of the world, on the basis of an entirely fictional threat from phantasmagoric weapons of mass destruction and a spurious claim of self-defense. (If any weapons actually existed in the first place, our invasion has put them directly into the hands of terrorists.) The entire effort was conceived and executed for the basest of political reasons, by a corrupt administration with financial interests in Iraq's oil industry.

Shortly after the invasion, for political reasons, the Bush administration said that countries which did not support the war effort should not get to share in the profits.In April, Colin Powell said that the U.N. would take a back seat in Iraq for the foreseeable future: "The [U.S.-led] coalition, having invested this political capital and life and treasure into this enterprise (is) going to have a leading role for some time." This not-so-subtle statment translates directly into: "To the victor go the spoils." Now that the spoils of victory are shaping up to be scores of dead U.S. soldiers and an expensive occupation likely to be counted in decades, suddenly the U.S. line is "We're paying for too much of this."

Concept: No risk, no reward
Severity: Why does the rest of the world bear responsibility for the mess we made when we blindly defied their well-reasoned opposition?

Link This :: E-mail J.M. Berger :: 9/3/2003


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