Raucously Calling for War

2002-12-15

The government is raucously calling for war, yet has provided nothing in the way of proof of any grave and imminent threat from Iraq. Because of the fact that the administration claims that it has incontrovertible proof that Iraq is in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that it furthermore knows without question that the 12,000 pages of Iraq's declaration of disavowal to the UN is a fraud, the question that logically arises is why does the administration refuse to produce that proof?

We are not permitted to view that proof, nor are the UN inspectors who were given the task of ferreting out such items and who, according to our government's spokesmen, are wasting their time (and never should have begun in the first place, according to Mr. Cheney.)

We are told to simply trust the president. And if he leads us into a war without a legal justification, well, he is not "obliged" to give us that, according to his spokesmen.

We can understand from this blindsided policy why many people here and in other parts of the world are led to distrust our government's willingness to forego the rules of honest proof, also its "Catch-22" pronouncement that if we find the weapons of mass destruction then they exist. If we don't find them they exist too but they are just hidden.

So no matter what the "doubters" may think, the administration's historically new preemptive military strike policy is set to go, seemingly unstoppable and out of control.

It becomes more difficult each day to recognize our country. This is a government, ours, that talks about the easy tactic of "taking out" Baghdad as cavalierly as if the spokesman were talking about a computer game, a government that makes no secret of its intention to use any and all the means in its arsenal to show our "resolve" to establish "our credibility." This is a government, ours, that produces "bunker-buster" missiles as part of its new arsenal, touting them as newly useful against underground targets, a weapon that blurs the distinction between nuclear and conventional war, eroding the historic taboo against nuclear warfare.

If truth be told, our government's military policies seem utterly devoid of any sense of justice or proportion. In order to stop a possible future hypothetical attack we plan to rain down bombs on innocent civilian heads based on flimsy and hysterical evidence which we are asked to trust our administration possesses.