We have a war-crazed vice president. An addict,
a verifiable military junkie. Many of us perhaps do not fully realize
this.
We are very unfortunately saddled with one of the least charismatic
least interesting most intellectually acrimonious and most desperately
hawkish, violence-hungry, soulfully inscrutable vice president in decades,
and he wants this country at war, now and always. Oh yes he does.
Here is Dick Cheney, speaking to veterans of foreign wars, hyping up
the need for a dramatic, wildly expensive pre-emptive
strike against evil Saddam and evil Iraq because Saddam is without a
doubt right this minute developing super-evil weapons of mass destruction
and probably plans to rain them down on cute American babies and squads of
helpless virgin cheerleaders at patriotic college football games any
minute now, swear.
Here is Cheney, pounding his tight little fist on the podium and
scowling hard and looking like a sad cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy
and a mortician, trying not to get too agitated lest the defibrillator
kick in, urging war war war now now now and never you mind how Iraq hasn't
had weapons-grade plutonium to make nukes in well over a decade, thanks to
ongoing UN intervention. This does not matter.
And never you mind how, even if Saddam has developed ugly biological
weapons, and even if he were utterly foolish enough to want to aim them at
the U.S., his paltry and utterly decimated military doesn't have a single
rusty fighter jet or decent missile or otherwise remotely capable delivery
method in its entire depleted force to effectively deploy such chemicals
any further than a religious zealot can spit.
Does Iraq have chemical weapons? Oh goodness yes, swears an
ever-petulant, oddly inanimate Dick. But then again, so do we. And so does
Iran. And North Korea.
Shhh. We don't care about them. They do not threaten our oil relations.
They do not offer the tantalizing and almost irresistible prospect of
unobstructed access to that precious black lucre if we can just overthrow
Saddam and set up a nice puppet government, just like -- once more, with
feeling -- Afghanistan.
And Iran and North Korea, they do not snicker at us and call us names
while openly mocking our attempts to further crush an already pre-crushed
Afghan nation, despite how insodoing we apparently thoroughly screwed up
and inadvertently allowed thousands of al-Queda fighters to escape into
neighboring countries as we pondered how best to turn large Afghan rubble
into smaller Afghan rubble. Whoops.
Here is Cheney, calling for quick attack right now let's get that paper
tiger boys go go go, despite increased outcry and resistance and many,
many voices of dissent, many from his very own conservative political
party. Not to mention the complete lack of a single U.S. ally that
supports the idea of such an attack. Not one. And why? Because there is
simply no verifiable proof Iraq is any sort of significant threat.
But Dick shall not be deterred. He knows no other way. He is a
military-manic businessman who raked in millions as CEO of Halliburton,
setting up numerous oily
deals with Iraq (and Saddam himself) not so long ago, and he knows the
possibilities. Dick bleeds slippery military-industrial blood, eats dove
ideology like raw jerky, dreams in Technicolor explosions. This is our
vice president. And he does not really care what you think.
Because Dick fully realizes how much money there is to be made by his
(and Dubya's) grinning corporate cronies if we can just find a way to keep
the tanks rolling. Corporate America is already as giddy as schoolgirls at
all those multibillion-dollar homeland security contracts coming their
way, the biggest federal expenditure since the Cold War. Why stop there?
Hey, now that you mention it, North Korea is acting sort of uppity. Hmm.
At some point we must step back and realize that the second most
powerful man in the world -- the one who, as everyone knows, substantially
controls every decision made by the most powerful man in the world, which
hence makes him the de facto most powerful man in the world shhh don't
tell Geedubya or he might have a tantrum -- is an outright war-eager hawk,
a certifiable military addict, hell-bent on keeping America deeply and
perhaps irrevocably engaged in war for as long as his cardio-Duracells
have juice.
And we have to realize there is no one in the upper Bush administration
who is acting as a balancing voice, who is calling for peace, perhaps
urging a major rethinking of our oil and military policies, someone of
significant intellectual depth and compassion who understands the nuances
of our voracious foreign policy and if you said Colin Powell you haven't
seen the pictures, all slumped shoulders and vacant eyes and impotent
trips to Israel, emasculated and exhausted. Powell is Cheney's favorite
footstool.
So here is Dick Cheney, howling into a vacuum, calling for more and
increased violence and major expenditure and further stirring of anti-US
hate in the face of almost unanimous global opposition. And Rumsfeld is
grinning like mad.
And Bush, well, he's on the horn to his dad every night, slumping in
the Oval Office chair as the old man advises and snickers and grumbles
about old grudges against Saddam and how we need to rip him a new one
dag-nabbit. Poor Dubya is getting it from both sides, his two main
puppeteers, urging war, as the world frowns, shakes its head, sighs.
--September 9, 2002
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