From my local newspaper today. We're really gambling with our and our children's futures.
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President has led us us into three quagmires
By Robert Chianese
July 15, 2003
President Bush and his neoconservative handlers have got us into a mess -- at least three of them.
The Iraqi quagmire, now obvious to everyone, will take years to get out of, with unconscionable loss of the lives of U.S. troops. Can you imagine patrolling that hostile urban guerrilla war field? This tops the land war in Asia military leaders warned against in the 1960s.
The billions per year spent trying to manage the anarchy we have made of Iraq, the strain on international relations and the increased hostility of resentful Middle Eastern peoples, with the ensuing terrorist activity, make this a costly and dangerous blunder. At home, we lose distinctive and fragile freedoms, with Attorney General John Ashcroft launching new assaults on the Bill of Rights each week in the name of security. And this Iraqi invasion is really just Act One of an extreme makeover of the Arab world in the image of our corporatized democracy.
The economic quagmire may not be as obvious. Bush's tax cuts over the next 10 years will drain the ability of the country to meet the basic needs of its citizens for education, health care, clean air and water, environmental protection, etc. Bush's plan is to deprive federal programs of funding and then claim they're not working. This has been the neoconservative strategy on public schools, with subsequent calls for privatization and vouchers.
The economic quagmire will last long after the Iraqi one. With tax policy that favors the rich and corporations over the middle class and working poor, Bush has monkey-wrenched the economy for decades to come. The neocons want whole federal departments to go -- Education, Environmental Protection, Transportation, etc. Their long-term strategy of starving federal programs that have taken years to build depends on a deliberately induced economic crisis. This is dismantling government rather than shrinking it. Under the false banner of promoting economic growth, Bush slashes the federal tax rolls and creates massive deficits in order to curtail services and regulatory policy that enable average people to live moderately well. He is creating the perfect economic storm.
The third quagmire is potentially the most dangerous. Bush has opened the door to nuclear war by developing usable nuclear weapons for so-called tactical battlefield use. Forget 40 years of disarmament, forget nonproliferation treaties, forget global efforts to get nuclear weapons out of the military arsenal. And forget existential fears many of us live through when these weapons preoccupy consciousness. The United States now lurches down a road that easily leads to nuclear rearmament by both "first world" nations as well as "third world" ones and so-called rogue states and terrorists. This road is a spiral of increasing dangers we may never escape. Bush has made the world a more dangerous place, threatening the safety of the American homeland.
What's the pattern here? It seems to be to throw caution to the wind, forge ahead with some half-baked plan for go-it-alone American dominance, and leave reason, history and common sense behind in apocalyptic visions of national and global transformation.
Does this sound like a radical agenda? With a religious tinge? Something fanatics bent on jihad might devise?
Bush's quagmires are prescriptions for American tragedy of unimaginable proportions. Americans are not used to tragedy. We do not believe in Humpty-Dumpty. We're a born-again society. We think we can fix everything. As we race off a precipice on a fast-moving bicycle, pedaling for some does seem easier.
-- Robert Chianese lives in Ventura.
Copyright 2003, Ventura County Star. All Rights Reserved.
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We need to get this man out of office in November 2004!!!!