Bush administration left the nation wrecked.......

by Jacqueline Marcus

After the election, we believed President Obama would wind things down in the Middle East, and diplomatic solutions would replace costly military operations. For nearly 10 years, we've tolerated inexplicable excuses for invading Iraq and Afghanistan -- all in the name of a vague and meaningless term: terrorism. We invade and bomb people we've never met and then we're surprised that they want to fight back. For eight long years, we've watched the Bush Administration spend billions and billions of our tax dollars for the Iraq invasion that was never connected to the September 11 attack.


(Many of us did everything we could to prevent said horrors and stop them once they began. We in no way tolerated it nor did we support it. We protested in every way we could within the law, except for non-violent acts of civil disobedience.)

In these last nine years, what did the invasions accomplish? The illegal and indefensible occupation of Afghanistan and the expansion to Yemen have only served to increase hate and anger against the U.S. Perhaps if we provided bread instead of dropping bombs on these extremely poor people, rebels would have no reason to plot against us. Nine years later, it has now cost Americans over a trillion dollars to shut down a few hundred Islamic radicals. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost as a result of the U.S. military invasion in this poor region of the world. 


(I do not buy that the whack-jobs known as Al Qaeda are dirt poor Muslims who hate America because they are dirt poor. Osama bin Laden is one of the wealthiest terrorists ever known. The men who allegedly flew air planes into the WTC were all middle class in their countries. The latest nut-job activity was attempted by the son one of the biggest bankers in Nigeria. He was not some poor kid from Jenna. However, it's for damn sure that the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq did more for Al Qaeda than anything Osama bin Laden and his religiously insane comrades could have ever dreamed of doing in the near decade which has followed 9/11/01.The same can be said for the Gitmo debacle, Abu Ghraib, the U.S. gulags in Eastern Europe and the policy of torture which was employed. These terrorists are dangerous and no one should doubt that.Thanks to Bush and Cheney, they are more dangerous now than they were on 9/12/01.) 

Voters are boiling mad at both parties because they want these wars to end. They want their tax dollars to help them. They are sick and tired of a war economy that wrecked and shattered American businesses like a domino effect. Resorts are empty. Shopping malls are empty. The housing market is an endless sea of foreclosure signs. There are more homeless people than I've ever seen in my entire life. Fact: when unemployment rises, so does crime. Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" comes to mind. "As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received." Our pro-war Congress gave our entire public treasury away to military spending. It's been reported that the number of Americans on food stamps rose by 50%. We can no longer brag that we're the richest country in the world. The war profiteers destroyed the foundation of our middle-upper class economy, which was once a beacon to the world.


(Amen!)

In November, while in Maui for my struggling solar business, I visited my friend who was staying at one of the Wailea resorts. This luxury resort looked evacuated. There were a couple vacationers from Japan and China, but very few Americans. We could sit in the hot tub or lounge around the pool without seeing a soul; and although it was great to have the entire resort to ourselves, it was rather eerie and frightening.

(The only Americans with the real money don't go to the same luxury resorts that you do. Most people cannot not fathom the kind of places where the Wall  Street crooks vacation.)
  
President Obama seems to feel that he must answer to the war criminal, Dick Cheney, the man who loves to torture prisoners before they're found guilty of the crime. I say this because we know there were many innocent Afghan farmers swept up in the al-Qaeda net, in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter to Dick Cheney: waterboard them. Well it's time for the media and for the president to remind Cheney that 9/11 happened on the Bush/Cheney watch. It's time to put Dick Cheney on the defense for a change: how many millions did he make from this perpetual war via Halliburton? How many secret, offshore accounts, if any, does he have in his family's names? How many servants does he have? How many cars? How many homes and what are they worth during the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression? 


(Questions we would all like an answer to. Sometimes I think that Dick Cheney believes that he is still in jeopardy legally. A U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, said publicly that there was a legal cloud over the office of the V.P. Cheney believes that the best defense is offense. That should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention at all in the last 8 years. His whole damn family is trying to protect him and their inheritance of his war profits. Other Republicans are afraid to say anything against him. THEY ARE AFRAID OF HIM!)


The other day, I was at the local hardware store and I happened to notice a soldier standing in line behind me. I mentally debated whether or not to ask him if he's been abroad, and if he could clarify the "mission" to me. Finally, I turned around and said, as politely as possible, "Thank you for serving." He nodded his head. I then asked if he was in Iraq or Afghanistan.

He told me he's been sent several times to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He confessed that "they fixed it so that we would never leave." I asked what he meant. "We've invested too much to just walk away: military bases, equipment, we want the oil…we want control. They say 'stabilize' which really means U.S. control… but they (Afghans-Iraqis) definitely don't want us there." 


(Didn't Junior tell his friends from Houston, who visited him in the White House, that he had fixed things so that the in-coming administration would not be able to withdraw from the war? I seem to recall that his friends returned to Houston with real concerns for his mental health. This was found in a Houston Chronicle article.)

He was pretty candid about it. I asked one last question before thanking him and wishing him well: Are they building a lot of prisons over there? He laughed, "Oh yeah, they call them schools." His tone was somewhat sarcastic. 


(OMG!)

Think about it: What is the difference between a street gang killer and an al-Qaeda terrorist? 


(Street gangs do not have major oil reserves, nor do they threaten Israel or offer areas of strategic logistics in the middle east.)

Answer: No one gives a damn about the street gang member or how many people are killed (there are hundreds of gang related U.S. deaths every day). If he's caught, he'll do time in prison -- whereas, the latter, the al-Qaeda member, is worth billions and billions of dollars in terms of military defense contracts and operations. War is a big business, just ask Dick Cheney, but only for the few, war profiteering elite.


(Let's add up all of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by our own religious and conservative far right. Tim McVeigh, the Olympic 1994 bomber, killings of so called "abortion doctors" and so on and so on. The flu kills more people every year than died in all the Al Qaeda attacks. More people die in car accidents. The list is endless. Nevertheless, it would not benefit anyone in the Bush/Cheney White House or Congress to whip up the fear about these killers.) 

We do nothing to end the poverty that leads to desperation, crime, and daily killings in our own cities. There are drive-by shootings every night in Washington DC, Chicago, LA, NYC, Honolulu -- across the country. Imagine turning on your TV and listening to the 24/7 media coverage on national security while bullets are blasting your windows and doors. There's no money for that problem. But there's an endless Pentagon budget worth billions of dollars for a hundred or so al-Qaeda rebels thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, hiding somewhere in the mountains. Go figure. 


(I am beginning to think this will never change. I'm sure it won't until we take Eisenhower's warning about the military/industrial complex, now the military-industrial-security complex, seriously. Until we demand publicly funded elections, the war profiteers and other corporate psychopaths will run the country.) 

No one is talking about the once wealthy business men and women who've been losing their shirts in this war economy. I remember reading in The New York Times that a real estate woman was making up to $180,000 dollars a year. Now she's on food stamps. Why should Cheney care about them? He and his family are sitting pretty with plenty of big bucks. Here's a flash for Dick Cheney: Everyone, including Republican voters, is sick of hearing about national security, especially when Americans are out of work and losing their homes.


(The economy of the country is a big part of national security. Doesn't anyone get that? Bush and Cheney ran this nation into the dirt, including trying to run to wars off the books, so that no one would know just how much the war debacles were costing. The SEC under the Rethugs was totally emasculated. The minute those clowns were elected with a rethug congress, the corporate officers, from sea to shining sea, knew it was party time.)  

Meanwhile, India is building some of the best engineering universities in the world while young American students can hardly read and write. That's what happens when a crooked government gives all the public funding to defense contractors for endless wars that make the few super rich.


(The dumbing down of America is intentional. It's not merely the funneling of big bucks to the Pentagon.) 


If President Obama's goal is to diminish al-Qaeda plots or attacks, then he should withdraw our troops from their countries. That's what Middle East citizens want there, and that's what Americans want here. Otherwise, it's time to start taking third party candidates seriously, candidates who want to end the wars and this war economy that has created the worst depression in our modern history. 


(That won't happen until we have public funding for elections and stringent laws about lobbying along with major jail terms and fines for violation. The corporate special interests will not allow a third party let alone a 4th or 5th.)

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

Jacqueline Marcus' book of poems, Close to the Shore, was published by Michigan State University Press. She is a regular guest contributor to BuzzFlash.com. She taught philosophy at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California, and is the editor of http://www.ForPoetry.com. She is currently promoting green technologies (solar & wind) on the island of Maui. www.GoSolarMaui.com. She is currently working on a new book: Corporate Media and the Erosion of a Civil Society.




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