Reply #19: Not very much has changed since Vietnam. [View All]

[Raven]

The American people like easy wars that don't cost money. It wasn't until your average middle class guys were getting drafted into the Vietnam War that people started paying attention to what was going on over there. Today, people are losing their jobs and falling out of the middle class and into bankruptcy...of course they care about money. They want to be able to educate their kids and keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. They are not keen on spending money on a country a half a world away whose people hate us.

I don't think George Bush misjudged the American people...I think he knows them very well. He had to lie to get us into this mess. Where he screwed up was in misjudging how hard it was going to be to get out of Iraq and now he's stuck. But I think that the American people will bail him out because basic decency says that we should not abandon a country that we have just laid to ruin. When we left Vietnam there were graphic scenes of people clinging to the rails of helicopters, desperate to get out because they knew what was going to happen to them once US forces left. The same will be true of Iraq.

I predict that Congress will give Bush his money and a good bit of that money will go to Bush's friends, and these friends will take good care of Bush. The UN will give him some meager political cover and get involved. The countries involved will demand some substantial economic benefits for their support and that price will be paid under the table. We will never know the price tag. When the reelection campaign begins in earnest, "terror" will be Bush's ace and he will attempt to frighten the American people into giving him a second term.

Many people are frightened. Until 4 months ago, I took the "T" to work in Boston everyday. It goes through the Kenmore Square tunnel and usually slows down and stops for a while. Every damn day I thought of what I would do if there was a terrorist attack in that tunnel...every goddamned day. If you don't think that the courage of the American people (if we ever collectively had any) has been eroded, you are missing a basic reality of American life in the 21st Century. And George Bush plays on the fear and the erosion of courage like a master fiddler. And why shouldn't people be afraid? Our local police and fire and public health departments are totally unprepared for a terrorist attack. The vaunted Department of Homeland Security is underfunded and unsupported by this administration. We are sitting ducks. And it won't be the Republican elite that get stuck in a Kenmore Square tunnel during an attack...it will me some mother holding down two jobs...or some father trying to make some extra cash to pay a mortgage or some working college kid trying to make it to class. It won't be George or his daughters or his friends.

What we have here is basically a failure of empathy. We have people running this government and the media who have no clue what life is like in the real America. They just don't know and they do not want to know. They will be well taken care of. As with Vietnam, where I began this rant...nobody cared about the poor black boy who died in a muddy trench. We cared when it was "our boys" at risk. Today we have a professional military made up of the poorest among us...people with no political power who have to supplement their pay with food stamps. We will take care of the people of Iraq before we take care of them. And George Bush will make that the price that we must pay for safety and peace of mind.