posted January 13, 2007
The speech by our President this week is indicative of the present lack of knowledge and leadership that afflicts our nation. This deficiency is not isolated within either political party, but cuts across all political ideologies.
The present conflict in Iraq is but a continuance of the failed leadership the Western powers exhibited at the end of World War I. At that time lines were drawn in the sand in the Middle East without the inclusion of local populations. The division of oil assets in that region were the predominate issue the US, France, and England considered at that time (see "A Peace to End all Peace" David Fromkin). President Woodrow Wilson, probably one of the greatest public administrator's this country has seen, was one of its worst leaders. His failure to recognize and seize the moment in the Treaty of Versailles, and the Balfour Agreement has haunted the world. The oversights by the past US leadership (President Wilson is not totally to blame) concerning world affairs have already cost us a world war (WWII) and are the driving force behind much of the violence in the Middle East.
The present conventional wisdom is that in Iraq the Sunni/Shiite secterian violence is driving the civil war. This is a very uneducated and unintelligent assumption. The fact is that the Iraqi sectarian violence is driven by tribal/family associations in much the same way that mob violence was driven in New York City at the turn of the century. These tribal associations carry greater weight to the average Iraqi than the Sunni/Shiite division of the Islamic religion. The lack of knowledge and expertise in Middle Eastern affairs (the FBI has no specialists in the Arabic language) causes our leaders to make decisions based on erroneous assumptions. At times it would seem that Bill O'Reilly has more influence in US/Middle Eastern affairs than CIA experts on the Middle East.
The disbanding of the Iraqi Army by the Bush Administration is just one of the many mistakes President George Bush and Vice-President Richard Cheney have made during this war: it is a war. The officer's in the Iraqi Army were not Saddam loyalists as were the Republican Guard units, and they could have been counted on to help keep the peace after Saddam was ousted. Many of our military leaders spoke out on this issue and bad judgement by the Administration, and they paid the price. President Bush offered no appology to these military leaders in his speech, and that is a gross insult to these specialist in their respective fields. Neither of these men (President Bush or Vice- President Cheney) have the qualifications to make the hard military decisions they are making, and by all reports they do not listen to the experts.
In the Vietnam War, President Johnson was quoted as describing the NVA and Vietcong as "a raggedy assed army from a third world country." Every Vietnam veteran I have spoken to, who was on the ground in Vietnam, would disagree with this catagorization of the NVA and Vietcong.
These people not only had the heart, but they possessed the will to bring the war to us. Our present administration would even deny this fact of history, and have often portrayed the Vietnam War in terms of a failur of our people rather than a failure of leadership. Ironically, Donald Rumsfeld was directly involved in the failures of Vietnam. Any boxer can tell you that to under-estimate your opponent is a serious mistake, but it seems that President Bush and Vice- President Chency don't know the rules of boxing. The Iraqi insurgents are not a "bunch of savages" as the Administration would have us believe. The Middle Eastern civilizations have been developing the rules of war for thousands of years. They know how to do it. The art of deception and treachery in international affairs is better known to their side than ours, but our leaders mistakenly assuming we are better considering our techonological edge. Didn't we possess a technological edge over the opponent in Indochina? The pretentious attitude of the Administration toward the enemy is appalling!
Toward the end of the Vietnam War our government developed a plan to Vietnamize the war there. We attempted to get the Vietnamese people to fight their own battles, even though the average Vietnamese was more worried about their next bowl of rice than democracy. We ignored the rampant corruption in the South Vietnamese government just as we are ignoring it now in Iraq. Vietnamizing the war in Iraq is no solution: history will show this to be true. We currently have over 100,000 contractors in Iraq who have received $400 billion dollars of US taxpayer money. Most of this money is unaccounted for. Our soldiers, sailors, and Marines are dying daily in Iraq, but our elected leaders have sacrificed very little to the cause. We cannot walk away from the Iraqi people after making shambles of their country. Would we have asked the Nazi's in Germany to stand up to the plate and run their country at the end of WWII? Preposterous! We had over 400,000 troops on the ground in Germany in the years after WWII. Germany is a smaller country than Iraq, and had none of the divisive elements the country of Iraq possesses.
The solution in Iraq is for the administration to mobilize this country is if we were at war and to enlist the nations of that region to help with the stabilization of Iraq. Mobilization and inclusion is the answer. It is in the best interest of all the countries in that region and the world for Iraq to be stable.
Furthermore, there was a time when the children of our elected leaders felt it a responsibility to serve their country in the military. Now they feel it their responsibility to party in Rio, or some other foreign city most American citizens have no opportunity to visit. Our country is in terrible shape. one in four children are born in America malnurished. One in six are malnurished under the age of six.
Since the deregulation of the economy our SAT and ACT scores have decreased, while college enrollment has increased indicating that we are dropping our educational requirements to gain college graduates. Spending for education, in relative terms, has decreased dramatically since the Great Society. More people are working two jobs now than every before, and American's spends $1.20 out of every $1 they earn. American's spend more time at work than almost any of the worker's in the industrial nations of the world, but we do not even have a national child care policy (see “When the Bough Breaks” Hewlett, S.A.). Three percent of the citizen's in our country control 90% of the wealth in the US, and our country contols 80% of the world's wealth. We incarcerate more of our population than any industialized nation. We have high drug addiction rates, and even higher high school dropout rates. Our country will not be able to compete on a global level within a few years, and it is our political leadership that is to blame; not the American worker. It is high time our elected leaders learn the Marine Corps motto that "leadership says come: not go." As Merle Haggard so adequately put it in the 1970's, we are rolling down a highway like a snowball headed for hell. What qualifications do our present leaders possess? President Theodore Roosevelt was not only a scientist, but also an attorney. He wrote books on many subjects. Our leaders now write books about their political exploits, which are mainly just "smoke and mirrors." It is high time we sent some "contenders" to Washington, and throw out all these "pretenders." This is true for both parties. At no other time in the history of this nation do we need leaders more than now. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Hugo Chavez is just another example of our chickens coming home to roost, but you won't get one politician in Washington to admit this fact.
We cannot exploit the resources of the world for our own benefit while the poor of the world waste away without even the essentials of daily life (see "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" John Perkins) without dire consequences in the future. The present world order will come to an end, as all things do. The only question is will the United States, in their present selfish/uniformed nature, survive the impending disaster. At that time of crisis we will very well see the enormous amount of pretenders we have in all walks of life on the local, state, and national levels. The contenders will be known then.
Stephen Durham
stephendurham@juno.com
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