“The Fine Print”, by
Michael Schrader
(Written and posted 12 March
2003)
Stupid people annoy me. I don’t know what it is, but I get really
irritated when I hear someone say (or write) something really inane. Perhaps it’s because I felt like I just
wasted ten precious seconds of my life, seconds that could be devoted to more
intellectually challenging activities.
When I first started writing
this column in 1994 in the Farmington (Mo.) Press-Leader, there was a
fellow columnist who, quite frankly, annoyed the snot out of me. This particular columnist boasted about
“shooting from the lip”, but each shot was nothing more than stupid, inane
drivel. On top of that, pretty much
everything this columnist wrote was dead wrong. Of course, I took the opportunity to mock the poor soul, but that
got old quickly, as it is no fun mocking someone who is too stupid to realize
that he or she is being mocked and ridiculed.
I have begun to seriously
wonder if that particular columnist is giving advice to our current
administration, which has the uncanny knack of saying stupid, inane things that
not only make Americans look really, really stupid but also really annoy the
rest of the world. I think this is the
reason I have felt such contempt for the current Administration since before
the election debacle of 2000.
I remember watching the
debates and seeing Gore provide enlightened, albeit boring, answers, and then
seeing Bush mangle the English language (it’s NEW-CLEE-R not NEW-Q-LAR) while
providing some response that had absolutely nothing to do with the question at
hand. (“Mr. Bush, what do you think
about expanding NATO?” “Well, Jim, I really like dogs.”) When the election was finally settled by the
courts, I hoped that Bush would make up for his deficiencies in articulating
his thoughts clearly by surrounding himself with lieutenants who had that
ability. No such luck. Instead, we are saddled with an Administration
that speaks before thinking, and in the process makes us look like the
uneducated nitwits that the rest of the world thinks we are.
The Administration in its
haste has so bungled the case that military action in the Persian Gulf is
necessary for national and world security and is an integral part of taking the
terrorists out that the rest of the world thinks of us as some “cowboy” or
reincarnation of Hitler. Our image
abroad is so poor that Britons think that George W. Bush is more of a threat to
world peace than Saddam Hussein. Sadly,
the Administration still hasn’t figured out that the more it opens its mouth,
the worse it makes itself look.
Somebody issue a gag order, please!
The core of the problem with
the current Administration is that it is too caught up in ideology and lacks
the pragmatism of Richard Nixon. Nixon,
for all of his faults, was never one to let ideology stand in the way of
pragmatism. It was Nixon, the old Cold
Warrior and McCarthyist himself, who was willing to set his ideology aside to
bring Mao-ist China into the world of nations.
Remember, prior to Nixon, the United States recognized the government of
Taiwan as the legitimate government of China, despite the fact that the
Nationalists had been driven off of the mainland in 1949 and exercized
absolutely no authority over any part of the mainland. Nixon, ever the pragmatist, realized that
despite his own personal feelings about communists, they were in control of the
1 billion people in China and that it looked rather silly to try and deny it. Additionally, we were hurting ourselves
economically by not trading with the most populous country in the world.
Nixon was similarly
pragmatic when it came to the Soviet Union.
He realized that the Soviets, like it or not, were our equal, and that
it was much better to have them with us than against us, no matter how morally
repugnant we thought they were. When
Nixon bombed Cambodia, he correctly argued that since the VC were based out of
Cambodia, we had to take their bases out to take them out. War doesn’t recognize political boundaries.
If a Nixonian pragmatist
were running the show right now, here is how military action in Iraq could be
successfully argued:
(1) When we buy gas, we are funding terrorists, as we are
forced to buy oil from rich Saudis who are funding the terrorists.
(2) This is not acceptable.
(3) Right now, the Saudis have no incentive to clamp down
on terrorist cells. There are two
countries that control one-third of the world’s oil reserves – Saudi Arabia and
Iraq. Unfortunately, Iraq cannot sell
oil because of economic sanctions, and the sanctions cannot be lifted until
Saddam is gone.
(4) If we can use the Iraqi oil, we do not need to buy
from the Saudis, and without our money, the rich Sauds cannot fund the
terrorists, and the terrorists will no longer be able to do their dastardly
deeds on such a grand scale.
(5) Therefore, in order to remove the terrorists’ source
of funds, we need to secure the Iraqi oil fields so that we do not have to buy
Saudi oil.
(6) In order to secure the Iraqi oil fields and dry up
the terrorists’ source of funds, Saddam must go and we must establish a
military presence in Iraq.
I firmly believe that if
this type of pragmatic argument had been made, the French, Germans, Chinese
Belgians, et. al. would be behind us.
After all, terrorism affects their national security, too.
Unfortunately, our
Administration lacks the pragmatists who could make this kind of convincing
argument. No, instead we have an
Administration full of ideological zealots who, before a single shot has been
fired, have managed to somehow transform a pragmatically justifiable action
into a morally unjustified one.
First, we have the President
himself resorting to name-calling. You
know, the whole “Axis of Evil” nonsense.
Good way to make it an “us versus them” Crusade type of thing. We all know how effective the Crusades were;
why on Earth would you want to do them again?
Then, we have Rummy
disregarding France and Germany as irrelevant.
If any two countries know about the costs of war, it is France and
Germany. If you look at all of the
major international wars of the past 300 years, either France or Germany has
been involved. (Both were involved in
our own American Revolution – the French on our side, and the Germans on the
British side.) Furthermore, France and
Germany are still the economic powerhouses of Europe whose fortunes dictate the
fortunes of Europe. Finally, France has
a veto on the Security Council—why in the world do we want to insult them?
To add insult to injury,
Rummy has now said that we don’t really need the British troops, after all; we
can go it alone. So here we have a
supporter in Tony Blair who is risking everything to stand side-by-side with
us, who has sent one-quarter of his troops to the Gulf, and his help isn’t
necessary? How many more countries are
we going to tick off by flapping our mouths before it is all done?
I think the thing that truly
annoys me about how our government has approached this situation has been its
incessant playing of the morality card.
“We must take out Saddam because he has murdered tens of thousands of
his own people.” Yes, I agree, Saddam
is a bad dude, and the Iraqi people will be better off without him. However, it is rather duplicitous for the
United States to ever play the morality card, and the rest of the world knows
it.
After all, we are a nation
that held a sizable portion of its own people in bondage until the situation
was resolved by force. We are a nation
that rounded up and slaughtered much of its own native population because we
wanted their land. We are a nation that
sat on the sidelines trading with both sides of a deadly European conflict in
which tens of thousands were gassed. We
sat on the sideline while Stalin tortured and killed millions of his own
people. We sent Jews back to Germany to
be slaughtered who somehow managed to escape the Nazi executions and make it
across the Atlantic to our shores. We
stood by while Pol Pot eliminated one-fifth of his people. We have no right to talk about moral duty,
as we have abrogated that duty many, many times.
I just wish that once our
government would tell the truth – we need to secure Iraqi oil fields so that we
will no longer be put in the awkward position of funding those who want to
destroy us. It bothers me to know that
when I fill up my car with gas, some of that money will end up in the hands of
terrorist thugs thanks to our Saudi “friends.”
Where is Richard Nixon when
we need him?