BUSH DEFENDS SHARON'S WITHDRAWAL PLAN/TERRORISM

(The following is meant as political satire only. It does not reflect the intent of anyone anywhere.)

Dear President Bush,

Thank you so much for increasing the risk to your troops by backing Mr. Sharon and therefore adding Hamas and the PLO to the list of people determined to see your satanist state go down in flames. We were really convinced what with the recent "cease-fire in Falluja" lie told by your media that we and our Iraqi brothers were losing steam. Thanks to your bold and reckless move, Hamas and the PLO are giving us all the money, expertise and manpower we need to "stay the course". When the suicide bombs go off in the malls of America you'll have our sincerest thanks.

Regards,

Osama Bin-Laden.


"But OP" you ask -"Doesn't Senator Kerry also support Isreal's plan?"

That's beside the point: It was a matter of timing - now is not the time.

Isreal was going to go ahead with its plan regardless whether the US supported it or not. Why not privately support Isreal but keep a lower public profile rather than announce to the entire Arab world that you support their worst enemy?

I mean honestly -do you really think that this announcement did anything more than piss off the average Mohammed in the Arab street and harden the resolve of the fanatical elements in the Middle East, in particular the Iraqi insurgents?

The JIC (Jackass In Chief) wouldn't know diplomacy if were read to him by Condi Rice.


In other news:

Been thinking a lot about terrorism lately.

Now before a squad of Ashcroftian goons from the DHS break down my door, I should clarify: I was listening to the testimony from the 9/11 hearings and was particularly struck by Jamie Gorelick's comment – “terrorism is a tool. It is not an enemy in itself; it's a tool.”

What is terrorism? I find that often the best place to start with such questions is the good old dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary defines terrorism as: “the systematic use of violence, terror or abuse to achieve an end.”

It’s that last part “to achieve an end” that Gorelick was talking about, and which the Bushies seem to forget. Unfortunately, this administration seems to have the idea that terrorism is the result of the proliferation of terrorists. You can hear it in their rhetoric: “We need to take the fight to the terrorists,” "freedom and democracy are under attack", "This broad-based and sustained effort will continue until terrorism is rooted out". Listening to a Bush terrorism speech gives the uneasy feeling that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Did you ever try to turn in a High School English paper after having only skimmed the book it was supposed to be about? Confession: I did, and while I was able to pull the wool over 1 or 2 teacher’s eyes with an excess of rhetoric (or more likely the teachers gave me a pass because the rhetoric demonstrated enough proficiency that they wouldn’t feel guilty giving me a “C” and moving on to better or worse papers), I ended up repeating myself over and over, and wandering in logistical circles. Bush’s terrorist logic is creepily similar –“they hate us because we’re free, and therefore they are the enemies of freedom. Freedom is God’s gift to mankind, every human soul yearns to be free” etc. etc. as though he’d read the introduction to the anti terrorist handbook and then played hooky in Crawford for the rest of the time.

We’re always so eager in this country to declare “war” on something, because it makes us sound more serious. Wars need to be fought against an enemy however, and terrorism itself is a poor one, because we can’t just go out and attack it. Oh, to be sure we can attack states that sponsor terrorism, but this (contrary to the assertions of the Bushies) is rare, because it is more common that states are struggling against terrorist groups within their borders than that they are exporting it. We can also attack groups or individuals who are responsible for terrorist attacks, but this won’t end terrorism because the groups will keep organizing and killing one will only breed more.

As a corollary, the war on drugs has proven to be a miserable failure because many administrations (including, sadly, the Clinton administration) have labored under the misapprehension that the drug problem was caused by there being too many drug users. This resulted in an imbalance of priorities where enforcement was paramount and where other methods of dealing with the problem like treatment and prevention were cut or severely disabled. This did nothing but fill the jails with drug users which was good for the prison guard unions and the construction industry, but did little to solve the problem. Even more than that, nothing was done to looking into the root causes of the problem i.e. what makes people turn to drugs.

This approach is the same one the Bushies are taking to terrorism. It’s like telling an alcoholic “your problem is that you take too many drinks. Reduce the amount of drinks you take and you’ll be all right.” Where the “drug warriors” wrongly thought that putting drug users in jail would curtail the drug problem, the Bushies are convinced that if they kill enough “bad guys” the problem will be solved. In fact this will only pour gasoline on the fire. The groups that perpetrate the terrorist acts will only match violence with violence. All throughout the Middle East hunger and poverty continue to breed terrorism, and until the international community addresses these issues there can be no hope of ending it. Moreover, it is naïve to think that the same conditions aren’t breeding “terrorism” here at home. The same frustration is leading to poor neighborhoods being “terrorized” by street gangs who have organized and acted out as a reaction to their situation and to the seeming indifference of the rest of Americans.

Conversely, where education and economic stimulus have insinuated themselves, there is a gradual relaxing of dogma. To illustrate: Iran is slowly coming out of their fundamentalist haze because the younger people there have become more educated, and that education has bred more understanding and tolerance of the west. This in turn has created a desire to relax the restrictions that the Shiite fundamentalists clung to. This happened without anyone declaring a war on them and despite being named as part of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”. China is in the midst of a capitalistic boom and is becoming more and more a “communist” nation in name only.

This is not to say that criminal acts should go unpunished, but that the international discourse should be weary of tarring with too thick a brush and more attention should be paid to education and economic conditions. If terrorism is a “tool”, then the only way to end it is to achieve the end some other way –why use a screwdriver when you have a Makita?

POP QUIZ

QUESTION: You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?

BUSH: I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it... John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could've done it better this way or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet
I hope -- I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.

text of press conference

Here's the leader of the free world. He's had nearly 3 years since the worst tragedy on American soil in 50 years, and he can't even say what he's learned? Not even canned BS?

No "Intelligence failures must be corrected"
No "there is a systemic problem in the separation between the FBI and CIA" ala Condi last week.
No bullshit reference to how "they'll stop at nothing because they hate us?"
Not even a token "9/11 changed everything"?

Nothing! Not one fucking thing!

Wouldn't you have obsessed about it for the last 2 1/2 years? Wouldn't you think that you never want anything like that to happen again? WOULDN'T YOU HAVE AT LEAST HAVE COME UP WITH AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION "WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED"?

God help us all.