At random 7/13

It's long since become gruesomely monotonous: the nightly news that still another U.S. soldier (or, more often, group of soldiers) has been ambushed and shot dead by still another Saddam Hussein supporter. Where are all the Iraqi millions who were yearning to breathe free of Saddam's barbaric torture chambers? Where are all the down-trodden Iraqis who, we were assured, would greet our troops to their shores with open arms? Military intelligence? I don‚t think so. We haven‚t seen any of that in a very, very long time. What are we doing, still, in Iraq? Saving our country from a nuclear threat? I don‚t think so. Wasn't Saddam Hussein trying to buy uranium from an African country to construct a nuclear device, as Bush had said he was? Well, no, it turns out that was a misstatement -- "lie," if you will -- that Bush used to stampede the gullible electorate (that is, us) into accepting his dandy little war. Weren't there already secret stashes of nuclear weapons that Saddam had, just waiting for the missiles capable of delivering them to U.S. shores? Nope. If any "weapons of mass destruction" are ever found, they'll have been hidden in Iraq by U.S. forces (sort of like the Easter Bunny with his eggs, don't you know). I repeat, what are we doing, still, in Iraq? 1) Getting U.S. personnel killed and maimed. 2) Spending U.S. dollars that we can ill afford. (Someone, remind the nitwit in the White House that we're in a recession of his making; and if he doesn't like that term, then how about the more realistic depression.?) Bush says we're going to wait around until we can get Iraq on its feet again. But he hasn't had the wit to inform the American taxpayers -- who will be the ones, after all, to foot the bill. How he plans to do this. George being a Bush, it will probably have something to do with oil. Perhaps he will criss-cross Iraq with a huge network of highways and 5,000,000 little autos, which will yank the country into the 21st Century, to the temporary delight of all Iraqis. Yes, American forces have toppled the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, forcing the tyrant to take some lofty refuge inside his own country, it appears. But the infrastructure of Iraq appears to be in a state of extreme chaos and disrepair. How long is it going to take us to rebuild it so it runs like Mayberry R.F.D.? I think we're there for the long run. It seems to me we've wrecked the infrastructure of Iraq but left its dictator unscathed. Mr. Bush, in his effort to appeal to the American black voters for the next presidential election, has undertaken to visit Africa. There he will find millions of people dying of AIDS. To them he has, therefore, pledged $15 billion to help keep an entire generation of Africans from being exterminated by the disease. But I wonder if he realizes that such a noble undertaking is more complex than simply plunking a check for that amount down on someone‚s desk. It's always been an abiding weakness in American presidents that they think any problem, no matter how complex, can be solved with a little checkbook diplomacy . While he's in Africa, he's finally going to have to decide whether to send U.S. troops to stanch the bloodshed in Liberia, that country settled by U.S. slaves in the mid-19th Century. I hope he doesn't ask the U.S. Army intelligence how difficult such a venture will be. They'll just tell him to jump right in. But that might be a big mistake, a little like Brer Rabbit jumping in the briar patch. For one thing, the Liberians will not be fighting with bows-and-arrows and blowguns. They'll be using the automatic weapons, the grenade- launchers, and what not sold to them by -- yes, you guessed it -- the United States government. U.S. soldiers killed by weapons manufactured by their own country. It was bound to happen sooner or later, wasn't it?. It's not very far-fetched to predict the NBC Nightly News of some evening in the year 2004 or 2005: the U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, the Philippines, as well as downtown Los Angeles. Question: What will happen when a real "evil empire" nation or coalition of nations declares war on the U.S.? What will we tell them? "Sorry, we don't have any troops left to deploy; you'll have to wait until we get unstuck from one of our commitments in the world. Come back later." Wasn't that the rationale behind the tar baby? It's almost as if there were an evil genius working out a grand scheme for spreading American power so thin around the world that he was bankrupting the country. Who might that evil genius be? George W. Bush?