it’s so depressing to read the news nowadays. I feel soooo glum after just a glance at the headlines.
I was watching C-Span2 yesterday when President Bush gave his speech on the importance of containing Saddam Hussein. More and more, my views about the war have become ambivalent… it just feels inevitable. It really makes me mad because it seems like a situation we could have easily avoided for the time being. Did the “scary Saddam” issue need to come up now? in an election year? when presidential approval ratings are sinking because the bush administration is doing nothing about the economy? I mean honestly. and now that we have brought up the issue of Iraq, if we don’t back up our words with action, then we’re basically asking for it.
President Bush has done nothing except create a culture of fear in hopes of distracting from more pressing domestic issues. Yes, the crisis in Iraq IS important, and yes, Saddam is “homicidal dictator” as Bush said in his speech yesterday. But he’s been a dumbass in handling the entire situation. It’s so crassly American to play cowboy-shoot-em-up in handling everything, crying that the UN is a poor sheriff and claiming to take over the ten-gallon hat from them. Honestly, the UN is a WORLD organization. there is no LEADER. Kofi Annan (spelling?) is just the lead compromiser in the organization, not any sort of dictator. He can’t tell individual countries what to do. And when the US threatens an unprovoked attack at another country, what does it mean for the world organization at large? what does it mean for global security and stability when one of the world powers (arguably, THE world power) suddenly decides that the world doesn’t look right by them and will wage war to correct things to suit themselves? That’s what the US appears to be doing. for all Bush’s talk on doing this for the world, if the world isn’t on our side, we’re not doing this for anyone but ourselves. What will happen to Iraq if there really is a “regime change”? Bush said that the government in Afghanistan now is better than it was when the Taliban was in power. But we haven’t replaced it with anything. Things honestly arent much better… in fact, they might be worse. We took out the Taliban in Afghanistan and didn’t do anything there once we got rid of our enemy. Is that what’s supposed to happen in Iraq too? what’s to say that the new government won’t be dangerous too?
The US does NOT have as much power as George W. Bush wants to think we do, and it’s time he and his administration got their heads out of their asses and realize what’s going on. There is no Cold War Russia anymore, Condi Rice, there is no need for war mongering, Donald Rumsfeld. Remember, it’s that stuff from the Reagan presidency that got us into trouble economically speaking during George H.W. Bush’s term.
I miss Bill Clinton. :( Al Gore made a speech about a week back expressing what a lot of people were thinking but couldn’t say about the war. For a moment, the former senator from Tennessee looked like he might be onto something and finally becoming the party leader the Democrats have needed for quite some time. But ohh… I miss Bill Clinton…