THE NEW AIR STRIKE PLAN
A Disassociated Press
Editorial, November 27, 2005
By Eric Mader
The Bush Administration,
whose Iraq war is a conflagration cloaked in a quagmire shrouded in a lie, has
a great new idea. The idea, like
many of the ideas they've had, is quite a simple one: we start bringing the
troops home, but still keep up our aggressive war against the insurgents. And how do we accomplish this? We do it simply by using more air
strikes.
The new plan, in short,
involves a kind of strategic replacement scheme. Where once we had American soldiers on the ground risking
their lives, we can now just use guided missiles.
It seems so obvious. It's a wonder nobody thought of it
before.
Presumably this new idea
about using more air strikes came directly from the Bush cabinet or some
Bush-affiliated military think tank.
Now the Bush cabinet--as
far as my studies have revealed--is basically made up of Dick Cheney and Don
Rumsfeld. Or at least these two
long ago stopped listening to the State Department or anyone else that might
have some point to make.
And as for Bush-affiliated
think tanks, well, as far as I can tell, that would also basically be Dick
Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Or at
least there's nothing that any intellectual or expert could offer that these
two men wouldn't be able to figure out on their own. I mean you don't get to be Halliburton CEO just by being a
pigheaded dope, now do you?
But I'm being facetious, I
know. What I'm doing is
simplifying the really very complex process of making U.S. foreign policy by
saying that it all comes directly from Cheney and Rumsfeld. And I'm doing it just to make the Bush
people look foolish. As if they
needed me for that.
Of course it's true that
Bush policy is not made only by two men.
There is much more to it.
As Bush has implied on many occasions and perhaps even stated literally
on one or two occasions, it was the Lord God who told him to invade Iraq. From this we should infer that the Lord
God is also part of the Bush cabinet along with Cheney and Rumsfeld.
I would like to listen in
on one of their meetings some time.
Does the Lord always attend, or only for the important meetings? Does He actually make His Face shown in
the Oval Office, or does He join the meeting by speakerphone? But these are Mysteries that only
future White House historians will be able to answer.
Anyhow, the new idea is to
win Iraqi hearts and minds and defeat the insurgency by slowly bringing troops
home and replacing them with air strikes.
There will certainly be many advantages to this method, and even a
non-military man like me can think of a few right off the bat.
For one, the way things are
now, when our troops go out to fight insurgents they generally locate the insurgents
and battle them directly. The
insurgents shoot back and so identify themselves as insurgents, and then our
troops, with superior weapons and training, gun them down. With the new air strike plan, there
won't be any of this dangerous business of Americans taking enemy fire. No, the missiles will simply come in
from a distance and wipe out the insurgents en masse.
Also, the way things are
now, Marines often have to sweep through neighborhoods looking for insurgents
or insurgent weapons caches. With
the new plan, instead of having Marines kick in doors in the middle of the
night and ransack Iraqi homes, causing the women to wail and the children to
cry and cower in the corner, Iraqi civilians will simply have guided missiles
blow the fronts off their homes and cause the roofs to collapse, and won't have
to deal with wailing wives and cowering children because these will all be
dead.
So the superior technology of guided missiles will win the hearts of
more Iraqis because it will allow for less in the way of wailing women and
crying children in the middle of the night.
But also, we all know that insurgents mix in with the population, they
occupy rooms in buildings occupied by other people or in buildings adjacent to
those occupied by other people--by Iraqi families and so on. So it really is much better for
us not to disturb these people with American soldiers in uniform causing all
kinds of trouble in the neighborhood and making them feel like they are an
occupied country. Instead, with
the new plan we can just call in a missile strike on the neighborhood and the
insurgents and the buildings and families will all be gone in seconds. The Iraqis, seeing this is how it is,
will admire us for our resolve, and will immediately begin to build a new democracy
on top of the rubble, modeling their democracy on what we as Americans expect a
democracy to be--in other words, no laws based directly on the Koran.
We can expect Iraqis to do this because as Americans, and particularly
as Bush supporters, we ourselves know how important it is to keep church and
state separate. I mean, just as we
ourselves would not make legislation based on the Bible, so we can expect them
not to make legislation based on the Koran.
Or at least that's what I guess Bush supporters think. Bush supporters are patriotic
Americans, aren't they? They
certainly know what's in our Constitution regarding the enactment of laws based
on religion, no? So if they insist
that Iraq not start calling itself an "Islamic republic," they do so
according to the same principle that make them stand up against anyone who
would try to claim too vigorously that America is a "Christian
Republic"--right? This, at
least, is only reasonable if we're talking about a modern democratic nation.
But I'm drifting somewhat.
To get back to the air strike plan, which is the real topic of this
essay, the advantages, as I've said, are evident: fewer wailing women and
crying children to disturb people; swift destruction of Iraqi homes and
buildings, allowing for a smooth basis of rubble on which to build a New
Democracy. I am sure it is
thoughts like these--that and the upcoming U.S. congressional elections--that
have directed the minds of the Bush cabinet as regards this new idea of
replacing soldiers with air strikes.
But of course I speak here only of the human minds in the Bush cabinet, because, as we know, the
mind of the Lord God is inscrutable to men.
Unless you happen to be the president, that is, in which case the Lord
helps you make foreign policy.
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The Disassociated Press--News for Nation Builders
-------
DP Exclusive!!!
Read the MAYBERRY STREET MEMO
This recently leaked White
House transcript of an October cabinet meeting between Bush, Cheney, and the Lord
God will change our understanding of the lead up to war.
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Seymour Hersch's New Yorker article "Up in the Air,"
regarding the new Bush plan:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051205fa_fact
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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