Am I crazy? Are politics just a game, where one of the rules of the game is that you aren't allowed to admit that it is a game? Quote from the
President's speech from oh, around 5 October 2005 (couple days before I wrote this post):
Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, "what is good for them and what is not." And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that his -- that this is the road to paradise -- though he never offers to go along for the ride.
Now, am I crazy here, or could one not make a very similar accusation against the president?
Don't I have an earlier post here in which I complain about the fact that leaders are no longer at risk in wars? What if we changed the requirements for President: No person shall be president unless they have served in active combat. That might be interesting. And maybe, just to make them think a little harder about how serious it is to send other people's children to war, we should require that for a president to engage our troops in any combat, any of his own children must be enlisted and assigned a combat roll in the armed services? For all the "honor" that Bush claims there is to fighting this fight, has he encouraged his precious angels to join the fight? If so, he apparently doesn't have much sway with his kids, as they haven't done so yet.
But you know, all that aside, the real thing that has me baffled is how we can say the foolish things that we say. Okay, let's see - Bush criticizes Bin Laden for not "going along for the ride". Um. Bush hasn't faced any active combat lately of which I am aware.
Let's see, Bush criticizes the insurgents for fighting what we used to call a guerrilla war - now we call it terrorism because it lends consistency with the "war on terror" theme so important to this administration. He says that they should fight us out in the open. (I'm trying to find quotes of him suggesting this, not sure I've heard it from his lips - certainly suggested by others, though, and it is implicit in criticizing the tactics that they do use.) What? What the hell kind of idea is that? Firstly, before we can criticize the guerrilla tactics used by the insurgents, we have to look with shame rather than pride on the origins of the United States. I'm not willing to do that. Now at first, I was inclined to say here that the insurgents are a lot more brutal than our Minute Men. That's probably true, in that they blow up innocents as part of their war tactics. Then I remembered that we dropped bombs that blew up innocents to kick this war off, so I guess I'll have to concede, if unhappily, that they are still not fighting any less honorably than we. Secondly, if we really wanted them to fight in the open so it was a fair fight, we would have to agree to comparable forces and arsenals. I bet the insurgents would jump at the opportunity, if we said "Look, you don't use guerrilla tactics. In return we'll give you the same weapons that we use, and we'll only use an force of the same size that you can muster. Then it will be a fair fight." But you see, we don't want a fair fight - we want to win. So we want them to fight by our rules, and then we want to be able to use all the force and technology we can muster.
And here's why I am just so baffled by this life. You see, I am not arguing here that Sadam Huesein was a good guy. I'm not arguing that the insurgents are fighting a noble cause. I'm just saying that the rhetoric is so badly, baldly rhetoric, not an honest evaluation of the truth, that I can't figure out what's going on. And you see, all of this makes sense to me only if I assume that this is just a game. A sport, really. You try to psych your team up and psych the other team out. You jump up and pound your chest. You yell and scream and pound the ground. Then one team or the other gets the football across the line. Another 6 points.
