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ONE YEAR LATER |
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 Ron Miller is based in Blaine, WA |
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STRAIGHT TO HELL? |
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When America was knocked reeling on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, The Pentagon and the thwarted flight aimed at The White House, I found no fault with the initial moves made by President George W. Bush.
No new U.S. president deserved the cards dealt Pres. Bush that morning. But our pre-planned procedures for dealing with such attacks clicked into place and Bush was able to retain control of the ship of state even as it rocked with the worst blows it had faced since Dec. 7, 1941.
Yet the President's actions ever since those first days of grief and national agony strike me as being worse than incompetent. It should now be obvious to any clear-thinking American that this president intends to keep using the memory of 9/11 and our national outrage over it to shove his arch-conservative right wing program down the throats of the American people.
I could add the fact that he is the most inept, most embarrassingly ignorant and politically compromised U.S. president since the corrupt Warren G. Harding. But he could be all of those things and still rise to the awesome task of leading a wounded America in a truly noble manner. But he isn't doing that and I don't think he ever will.
I know this without a flicker of doubt: Altogether, he's the worst president in my lifetime--and my lifetime currently stretches all the way back to the second term of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Sadly, though, many Americans continue to cut him slack, even if they aren't happy about the state of the U.S. economy since he took office. Most of us recognize the Sept. 11 attack knocked America off balance. Some of us even are willing to look the other way when Bush does something infernally awful because we assume the new threats against our nation must have diverted the new administration away from its original program for America.
Well, here's what I consider to be the unvarnished truth: Bush and his cronies are using our national paranoia over terrorism to push an even more right wing edition of his original agenda on a nation that wouldn't swallow it otherwise. Bush is depending on the fact that American voters seldom desert a president during a time of national emergency. Meanwhile, he's doing nothing to seriously cope with that national emergency. For that matter, by promoting his plan for a war against Iraq, he's throwing gasoline on a fire that's big enough already.
Consider these situations you may have been reading about:
. Bush and his right wing sidekicks are risking a shutdown in Middle Eastern oil production by pushing for a U.S. war against Iraq. He knows other Arab oil-producing nations may react so negatively against an attack on Iraq that they'd cut oil exports to us. That's why Bush and his oil baron cronies are pushing for the removal of all environmental restrictions to our remaining domestic oil production resources. Even if he gets us into a gasoline shortage, he probably figures that will panic Americans so thoroughly that we'll gladly remove all environmental barriers, letting his oil company buddies get their hands on everything they've ever wanted.
. Bush also knows a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq would be popular in America, at least until the body bags start coming home, filled with our hometown boys and girls. Yet his administration still hasn't shown us any solid evidence that Iraq has managed to develop any weapons of mass destruction. Even if he gives Congress such evidence in the next few weeks, how intelligent was it to spook all our allies first and then drag out the evidence? And if he's bluffing: Iraq will never take him seriously again.
. Even if a U.S. led war manages to get rid of Saddam, the Bush administration has no plan for the "nation-building" it would have to do after Saddam's departure. Saddam has been a foe of Islamic fundamentalism. Are we ready to see a regime like the one in neighboring Iran put in power through Democratic elections in Iraq? And, by the way, didn't candidate Bush tell us he would do no "nation-building"?
. Bush's right wing advisers and Attorney General John
Ashcroft are managing to wreak a diabolical change in the U.S.
justice system under cover of our anger over the 9/11 attack,
taking us back to a time in which loyal Americans of Japanese
ancestry could be taken from their homes and put in concentration
camps simply because we were at war with their native land, Japan.
It's now beginning to look as if hordes of those unnamed people
of Middle Eastern background that the U.S. has been holding as
"material witnesses" or "prisoners of war"
may be innocent. If not, why haven't they been charged with crimes
yet? Bush's cronies have been manipulating our constitutional
laws so that people can be held without bail, without access
to legal counsel, without contact with their families as long
as our government wants to hold them. Some have been deported
after being judged in secret hearings. We hated this when the
Soviet Union used to do it. Now we're doing it! And how can we
complain if that's the way Americans will be treated from now
on when "detained" in foreign lands?
. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has virtually erased
any traces of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East by trying to
tell the Palestinian people who WE want negotiating on their
behalf in future peace talks with Israel. In just two years,
Bush has trashed any hope of the U.S. playing a mediating role
in the settlement of that crucial dispute--or probably any other
global dispute. Our rapport with Russia now looks seriously compromised--with
Russia now threatening to use its veto power in the U.N. if Bush
seeks approval there of its war on Iraq.
Anybody who's been paying
attention will recognize that all these developments were a natural
outgrowth of the Bush agenda. Conservative Republicans despise
the United Nations, so having the U.N. turn Bush down will cause
them no stomach pains. They want the U.S. going it alone, lording
it over all the nations of the world. And if the U.S. takes over
Iraq, wouldn't it be natural for Bush to appoint some of his
oil baron buddies to manage Iraq's petroleum assets during the
process of "rebuilding" Iraq?
Even if the growing number of Republicans who are pulling away
from Bush's strategy for Iraq finally talk some sense to him,
he may get enough accomplished to gloat his way through his remaining
two years in the company of the oilmen, loggers, industrial polluters
and investment crooks who surely know the way to his Texas ranch
by now.
In short, the first anniversary of Sept. 11 seems even sadder to me than ever because of the shameful things our President has been doing in its memory.
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
The 9/11 logo is © 2001 by Jim Hummel.
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