G.W. Bush Came Not To Honor The Dead, But To Bury Democracy

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 G.W. Bush Came Not To Honor The Dead, But To Bury Democracy
Contributed by richards038 on Wednesday, June 01 @ 10:15:23 EDT

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By Richard A. Stitt

On Memorial Day, while laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Bush rolled off yet another one of his lies, stating "America has always been a reluctant warrior." Yet, he and his band of war hawks thirsted eagerly and enthusiastically for the Iraq War. His preemptive bombing of that country to date has cost the lives of over 1,655 U. S. military and 100,000 Iraqi men, women and children. Reluctant warrior? Hardly. But, then again, Bush proved himself to be a reluctant warrior, skipping out on his last year of military obligation in the champagne unit of the Texas Air National Guard.

In reading the solemn words penned by his speech writers one would think Bush actually cares how many must die so that he can save his many faces which he presents to the American public. He, of all people, had no business defiling the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery where American soldiers and sailors are buried and who died in wars that threatened and endangered our freedoms at home, unlike the disastrous vanity war which one man who sought to exalt himself, G. W. Bush, unilaterally waged against Iraq.

Bush preemptively invaded a country which presented no threat to the security or interests of the United States, severed in three parts by a U.S.-British No Fly zone edict for twelve years, a country which suffered over twelve years under the United Nations-mandated economic sanctions, a country which didn't launch a single missile, sent up no air force in its defense, had no navy and possessed a ragtag, undisciplined, untrained, under-equipped army outfitted with World War II era Soviet weapons. And of course as Bush would like us all to forget, Iraq had absolutely no WMD. And he has the audacity to stand before the parents of wounded and dead soldiers and tell the world that America is a "reluctant warrior?"

The speech he gave this Memorial Day was a far cry from the triumphant speech he gave at the same site in 2003 when he crowed that major combat operations had ended in Iraq, still clinging to the preposterous and fictitious assertion that WMD would be found and that our military were stabilizing Iraq. But even as he spoke, 30 more Iraqi police and civilians died in a suicide bombing, one American soldier died in a separate attack and four more U.S. military died in an aircraft crash.

Up to May 2003, 160 U.S. soldiers died during combat operations. Now, the number is over ten times that and Bush's puppet regimes of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Baghdad's Ibrahim Jaafari are rife with terrorism, murders, daily attacks by insurgents, kidnappings and massive corruption inside and outside the centralized governments which have literally no power to control what has amounted to widespread anarchy.

According to a New York Times editorial, there are about 60 million American youth between the ages of 18 and 35-years-old eligible for military service. The military needs to recruit only about 80,000 per year to meet their recruitment quotas, yet the Army, Marines and the National Guard, the branches which have suffered practically all of the casualties and fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, have not met their enlistment and manpower goals since the beginning of the year. Needing only 1.3% of those eligible to serve, the all-volunteer military is sadly undermanned and stretched far too thin. Yet, Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, insist on closing bases at home as a partial financial solution to keep waging war in the Middle East where Bush stubbornly and arrogantly declared that he will bring democracy to that part of the world.

Had any of those in the Bush administration or the Pentagon high command taken the advice of General Eric Shinseki who said shortly after the Iraq invasion that the U.S. would need between 300,000 and 500,000 troops to restore order in Iraq and prevent violence from spreading, we would not be there today and Bush's grandiose dream of a free and prosperous Iraq may have been a realistic aspiration.

In spite of record yearly spending deficits at home Bush and his budget gurus insist on keeping the supplemental war costs "off the books," preferring instead to hand his complicit hand maidens in the U.S. Congress an excuse to call the routine war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan "emergency appropriations."

In order to keep selling this colossal failure in Iraq Bush trots out the usual toadies like General Tommy Franks (retired) of "we don't do body counts" repute and the ever-fawning sycophant, General Richard Meyers, who stays on message with the mantra, "We are winning the war on terrorism."

After three years, one would think that an administration with an ounce of integrity would begin to change their ideology to fit the reality. But that would be giving this intransigent, short-sighted mob credit for some intelligence.

As Bush said shortly after the November election, "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections. The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

And if Bush and his rubber stamp Republican U. S. Congress renew the expanded powers of the USA Patriot Act, set to expire at the end of this year, we may see a quickening of the construction of an American Gulag prison system rivaling that of Stalinist Russia. New surveillance powers not included in the original bill will allow authorities to compile and confiscate personal and private data, including library records, on all citizens. Many civil liberties and privacy rights advocates justifiably fear that this information will be used as a fishing expedition to create lists of political opponents of the ruling Republican regime.

If this past Memorial Day has a message it is this: Americans must stand up and reclaim our democracy which the Bush administration and his sick, twisted "moral values" tolerance-for-none religionists are hell-bent on burying forever. Their zeal for waving the Bible in the air to establish their rigid theocracy is a glaring testimony for their sorry example to understand or practice its message of love or respect for our freedoms and liberties contained in the U. S. Constitution.

G. W. Bush and his Republican cohorts have taken us far off the path of democracy and are steering our country ever closer to an authoritarian, one-party rule totally repugnant to everything on which this nation was founded.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer."