Me – Emailing Bush

Introduction: The two letters below I just mailed today. The first is to Bush, with an open carbon copy sent to both MSN Slate and The Guardian. The second is a correspondence sent to the Guardian and Slate only. It’s an experiment and a much needed venting of my ire. I don’t expect answers from any party, but it was liberating to release the tension. I feel better now.

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Note: If you’re a White House censor(Assistant or whatever an official term would be), how does it feel stripping away the honestly concerned, dissenting Americans mails to give Bush only good news?

Bush,

I find myself increasingly dismayed at what I see going on with your administration. You’ve just finished a war and already you make moves on another country, which you have only tentative ‘intelligence’ on. You don’t seek to make kindly diplomatic inroads, you start immediately with the demands to do the ‘right thing'(In other words out way or the highway) and spokesmen insult them with terms like ‘rogue state’.

Do you know anything about real diplomacy or are you and your advisors no more than thugs who play politician and pretend to pay lip service to diplomacy until the time is right to abandon it for strong-arm tactics and intimidation?

I’ll be blunt, Bush. You’re destroying America.

I see it on the news every day. I sometimes see in on Fox, which is surprising considering their bias. Though that bias is overshadowed by CNNs cheerleading.

I can’t imagine you are a malicious man. Ignorant perhaps. Selectively callous maybe. But malicious? No. Yet you can’t seem to see that your actions are destined to go wrong. Your chance to make amends is now, in Iraq. Yet you and your administration seem destined to screw it up when even I, in my lesser informed state, with no more than my wits and common sense to trust, can see the writing on the wall.

Your attempts to unify Iraq will fail. I believe that as I don’t believe any of you have enough smarts on the Middle Ease culturally or ideologically to realize that you can’t just solve the divisions created over centuries within a few short months or years. You might have the CIA and other agencies feeding you intelligence on people and places, secret factions and the like, but until you have a grasp of the minds of the people, all of that is next to worthless. Until you can take a step back and try to understand their wants and desires, beyond simple freedom, you can’t hope to give them what they want.

You will give them what you think they want. Some might take it, but others will reject it. Discontent will remain. Anti-American sentiment will rise and eventually Iraq will come to resemble Afghanistan. You do remember Afghanistan, right? The place we said we’d rebuild. Promised them a billion, we did. But they didn’t’ get it. Warlords run rampant and the leader we put there is largely powerless in his own country, with the opium trade restored to make ends meet and the Taliban slipping their fingers back in slowly.

And I suspect the same might be starting in Iraq, even as you appoint a retired general with too many ties to Israel to head the interim administration. Rather than seeking or having sought a talented and well liked Iraqi to give the illusion that there is some Iraqi say so in just how the country will be constructed. With a library chock full of their history and culture burned to the ground in Baghdad and US companies poised to make their new text books, what hope do they have of retaining the trueness of their culture and spirit?

The Iraqis are free, yes. They danced about it, yes. Saddam being gone is good, yes. But beyond those things, what god has happened? What about the small towns at the south border near Kuwait? Are they all restored with food, water, power, government and schools? They’ve been safe in US hands since almost the start. Yet there is one in the news that has none of these things(http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=focusIraqNews&storyID=2562410). Tell me, Bush, what of Safwan? Are the occupied by enemy forces? Are they in the middle of a minefield? Do the people fight off the Americans and make it impossible to help them? Or are they just too small, to insignificant to be bothered with? Slipped through the cracks? I think so.

This is your time to prove yourself, Bush. Ignoring the continued lack of ability to find the trademarked WMD that Iraq obviously has and the continued warmongering and general state of intimidation that you and your crew seem intent on, I want to see you make good on Iraq. I want to see that your words, as that is all they have been thus far, will mean something. Keep a promise. Just one and give yourself an ounce of credibility.

I dare you.

The concerned Kalen D’arrie (Pseudonym)

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Gentlemen and Ladies,

I have sent an email previously, reproduced here(http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=C101732&entry=11185), that I emailed to the president of the US and openly carbon copied to your two establishments. I’ve been considerably impressed by the breadth of your coverage and felt that it would be interesting to see what would happen.

I know the president cannot read every email he gets, but by the by, I want to be heard. If I have to spread around a little disorder to do it, so be it, though I have a feeling that my email will be just as ignored as the rest. You can do what you like with my email, its public property now. Though the diary isn’t. Of course, if you’d like to take a look and link me, I’d appreciate it. Always good to get word out and my diary is set to let non-members note me with their honest feelings.

Keep up the good work. Keep reporting it from both sides and let the people decide.

Kalen Da’arrie(Just because I like the pseudonym)