Happy Imbeciles On War

The San Francisco Gate is running an editorial so monumentally stupid it virtually wears a "Fisk Me!" sign on it’s back. So, without further ado, it’s time for an intellectual bitchslapping:

This is not a war. Iraq will not be a war. Do we understand this? We do not seem to understand this. This is heavily corporatized power brokers killing each other for oil and capital. Oh yes it is.

Someone needs to be bonked over the head with a copy of Clausewitz. Exactly what benefit would oil companies get from a war in Iraq? Let’s apply Occam’s Razor here: could a cartel of oil companies secretly be manipulating US policy from the sidelines without there being one shred of evidence supporting it? If Enron can’t keep a secret, what makes Mr. Morford think that Chevron or Exxon can any better – especially when it’s something as monumental as this? Then again, one should never look to deeply into someone’s paranoid rantings.

Let’s be perfectly clear. You cannot have a war when the so-called enemy has done nothing to provoke you and is absolutely no threat to your national safety and has no significant military force and has negligible chance of even setting off a firecracker near your own overwhelming death machines, and whose only weapons of minimal destruction are the rusty short-range warheads and biochemical agents we sold him 20 years ago, and kept selling to him, even after we knew he was gassing his own people.

You cannot have a war when there is nothing to fight against, when it’s essentially going to be a huge U.S. military stomping/bombing exercise, when, just like Afghanistan, we stand to suffer zero U.S. casualties (except for those we seem to kill ourselves), and we just bomb and bomb and kill and kill and shrug.

So Iraq poses no threat to the United States, right? Well, except for the possibility of a smallpox outbreak that would kill hundreds of thousands. Except for the possibility that Iraq has weaponized anthrax and could use it without the FBI having a credible link back to anyone. It appears it’s just better to stick our heads in the sand and pretend there’s no threat at all. Perhaps we’ll be lucky and Saddam will send a nuke over to San Francisco and remove America’s premiere haven of idiocy.

As for Afghanistan, perhaps Mr. Mumford needs a reminder that a little over a year ago it didn’t take a nuclear weapon or anthrax to kill 3,000 Americans. All it took was a few terrorists with mace and boxcutters. Perhaps he forgot that al-Qaeda attacked us first, and that we were in a war against a force that was out to kill every American – including useful idiots like him. Then again, such thoughts would take a level of intellectual honesty that San Francisco-based columnists seem to lack.

Saddam’s meager military, let us be reminded, is a tiny quivering fraction of what it was 10 years ago during Desert Storm, and even then it took U.S. forces less than four days to almost completely annihilate it.

Now it’s even weaker, due to ongoing sanctions and U.N. oversight and a decade of continuous U.S.-led bombing raids on Iraqi targets you never read about. Hell, this time we should have those thousands of pesky Iraqi soldiers and innocent civilians dead and slaughtered in a weekend.

This is a Mack truck versus a Pinto. This is an F-16 versus a paper airplane, a Tomahawk missile versus a spit wad. There is no contest. “War” is exactly the wrong term. The U.S. attack on Iraq will be, of course, a massacre. Go team.

Would you prefer that a few thousand American soldiers get killed just to make it more sporting?

Remember Afghanistan? Yes, we’re still there, warring away. Bombing and attacking and killing. Haven’t caught a single al Qaeda leader of note yet. That looks bad for Dubya. Killed a few thousand civilians though. Shrug.

Get your facts straight, dimwit. We captured Abu Zubaydah among others, and we didn’t kill a "a few thousand civilians" either – except for in the imagination of the extremist left.

So, let’s boil it down: Why go to war with Iraq? Can’t find Osama, is one reason. That looks bad. Really, really want to steal all that delicious oil for ShrubCo, is another. Saddam is clearly a very bad guy who kills his own people and snickers in America’s general direction, is a third. But then again, so are at least a half-dozen other vile tyrants of the world. Volatile, nuke-ready North Korea? Let’s open some talks. Feeble, oil-ready Iraq? Let’s massacre. Hmm.

Perhaps you wonder why no one is asking any of these questions, making similar points.

I’ve already covered the differences between Iraq and North Korea in some detail so I won’t repeat myself. If Mr. Morford feels there’s a lack of quality discourse on this issue, perhaps he’d like to add to it rather than throwing out a serious of unsubstantiated slurs.

Perhaps you wonder just where in the hell is the spineless major media in all this, as they watch the chicken-hawk Shrubster himself, between golf swings, announce how tens of thousands of American troops are being sent to the Gulf alongside an enormous billion-dollar military buildup and imminent gobs of heaping death raining down upon a paltry oppressed nation and coming up next on CNN, we interview that dumb guy from “Joe Millionaire.” Perfect.

Perhaps you wonder where is the national TV coverage of all those huge anti-war protests, hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world, from Spain to Berlin to New York to San Francisco.

Perhaps you wonder where are all the "serious" journalists, the risk-taking news agencies pointing up the absurdity of it all, the imminent horror, the outrage. Could it be these news agencies are owned by major conservative corporations? Could it be they’re all terrified of losing ratings, of saying something unpopular, of invoking Cheney’s wrath, of losing advertiser dollars and that ever-precious, ever-dwindling dumbed-down audience? One guess.

Perhaps if the anti-war movement had something worth saying they’d recieve more coverage in the mainstream media. However, there’s no story in covering a bunch of brain-dead hippies carrying banners reading "America and Israel are rogue states" and similar such knowledge. In fact, if I were judging the whole of the anti-war movement by such actions, I’d dismiss it out of hand. The left should consider themselves fortunate that the anti-war movement doesn’t get more coverage or more people would see them for the mindless ideologues that they are.

And besides, who needs a reason for a massacre anymore? This is the age of the preemptive-strike, screw-you Bush regime. Who needs, for example, the Monroe Doctrine, that crusty old rag stating how America will go to war only as a last resort, as a defensive measure, and won’t become embroiled in unwinnable foreign wars that are none of our business?

Who needs every precedent ever set by international law? Who needs the U.N. Charter? Who needs confused congressional approval? Who needs ethical integrity?

Who needs a clue about history, politics, or international relations? Not Mr. Morford by the looks of it. The Monroe Doctrine would today be considered absolutely imperialist – it was a statement that the United States had the right to expand from Atlantic to Pacific and that no European power could intervene. It’s part of the rationale for the Spanish-American War, a war that was far more dubious than our actions in the Gulf.

Furthermore, we have Congressional approval, a UN Security Council resolution, precedents of international law, and a moral imperative on our side. Granted, no evidence will sway people like Mr. Morford who would prefer to revel in their own little world where a bloodthirsty Bush attempts to control the world while herioc crusaders on the left try to transform the US into a socialist utopia like the Soviet Union or Communist China.

Screw it all, says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his black eyes gleaming like the devil’s own golf balls. Let us become an ever-more-hated rogue nation, attack whomever we want, whenever we want, with no international support and much international disgust. Let us squander, childishly, within months, the generous and compassionate goodwill afforded our country by our international allies in the wake of 9/11.

Let us wantonly kill innocent civilians and children and thousands of Iraqi soldiers who, let us repeat, did nothing to provoke us. Shall we? Yes let’s. Why? Shhh.

Yes, the Iraqis have done nothing to provoke us – other than firing on our aircraft, attempting to assassinate a President, supporting terrorism, threating our lives and security, and attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction. It’s all about killing people and taking their oil. Heaven forbid we even consider anything else… right?

Let us be clear. Saddam is not a threat to the U.S., and never has been. He is merely yet another cowardly and murderous thug, much like the countless other despots and autocrats, from Marcos to King Fahd to Ariel Sharon, the U.S. has added to its payroll when it served our needs, and whom we then backhand when we need economic stimulus, or when the president needs a boost to his approval ratings, or when the corporate pals of the Bush WASP mafia need more billion-dollar petrochemical and defense contracts. Aha. Perhaps this is why.

We are, in short, going to attack and massacre Iraq for the oil reserves, to protect America’s corporate interests, to feed the gaping maw of the military-industrial complex. Same as it ever was.

Again, the worldview of the left exposed. Ariel Sharon is a despot, not the democratically elected leader of a free nation. Iraq isn’t a threat, even though they could kill thousands of us with relative impunity and could blackmail the world by taking the Saudi oilfields. However, even making those considerations is verboten to this crowd as it challenges their dominant worldview.

But let us be perfectly clear: We are most definitely not cranking up the appalling war machine for your sake, or for the country’s protection, or for our commendable standing among our humanitarian allies.

We are not doing it to defeat terrorism (it will have the exact opposite effect), or to make the streets safer for our children, or because they’ve found big scary WMDs (they haven’t — not a one) — or even for Iraq’s own good. And to believe we are is, quite simply, to be wholly misinformed and openly, flagrantly, deliberately deceived.

If one is going to argue that the government is decieving us, one should hardly use blatant lies to argue ones points. Instead, Mr. Morford gives the usual leftist dogma without so much as one substantive or factual point to back it up. It’s intellectually shallow, dishonest, and displays what can only be considered attitudes of anti-Americanism.

People like Mr. Morford disgust me. How one can morally justify support for a regime that hires professional rapists, kills its own citizens, and makes war on other nations with no justification while simultaneously arguing that the United States is the real terrorist nation. In Iraq, someone like Mr. Morford would never be allowed to speak. Yet he is willing to slander this country with outright lies and deceptions in order to insult the freedoms he enjoys.

We do live in a free society, so Mr. Morford and his ilk have every right to speak. Yet they do not have the right to escape condemnation for their lies. If this is what the anti-war left wishes to be, then they have already lost any claim to the high ground either morally or intellectually.