You may see protestors out there protesting and think, do they know what they’re doing? We can’t let the Iraquis know we don’t have the heart for a real fight. And look at them. They’re not organized. They haven’t bathed. White kids with dreadlocks! They think they can change the world by pretending to throw up at city hall?
Well, I’m glad to let them shout. This is my shout right here. I don’t give a damn about Mumia. I don’t want to smash capitalism. I think “globalization” is a a word and not an evil. I’m all for free trade and free movement of goods services and people around the world. And I’m opposed to this war.
So is George Soros. Yes, that George Soros. The billionaire financier and philanthropist is the latest to object, sanely and forcefully, to the Bush policies.
I call on moderates and conservatives, preppies and yuppies and button-down shirt wearers, to reject this war! Join me, and the fiscal-responsibility lobby, and the soverign-international-law advocates! Take common cause with the Pope and the WTO and the godless anarchist hippies!
I consider myself a patriot, I really do. And I do not object to all war or all violence. I know a bit about other countries and I like this one because it is my home. But because I love it I can acknowledge its flaws and mistakes (e.g. Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973) and speak out against repeating them. I love my country and I would be willing to die for it, and I appreciate the valor of the soldiers who are out there fighting for … whatever it is. But I know this: The US Armed Forces are not in Iraq to protect me or to promote freedom. They’re pawns bleeding for someone else’s empire, or madness, or blind rage. And all the while our executives in the White House and the board room stay home undermining everything we stand for, dividing us, tearing us apart.
I know it’s too late to stop the war, really. It’s obvious by now that a fair number of the Iraqi people support Saddam despite their dislike of him, just like a lot of Americans hold their noses and support Bush in wartime. Bush is our leader, we have to support him, for national pride and for strength in unity. Saddam is their leader, they have to support him for just the same reasons. People have begun to make comparisons with Stalingrad: as awful as Stalin was, and as much as the Russians hated him, they fought to the death to defend their country because Stalin was their evil and they would not trade him for another.
Well, we’ll see be fighting house to house, and civilian bombardment, and we’ll level Baghdad and Basra, and send another half a million troops and quarter trillion dollars before it’s over. We’ll all suffer for this folly. And because I am a patriot I I will suffer with the rest of my country. But I’m not going to just lie down and take it, and I have no intention of letting George W. Bush escape the consequences for what he’s done.
Secretly Ironic 