6 years in the making pt. 1

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while but I simply haven’t had the time to sit down and write until now, because frankly… this is gonna take a while. so bear with me. I feel that the time has come for me to go on record and say this. It’s not just so I can be an I-told-you-so (though that’s kind of part of it), I want to explain to other people the way I see this so I can actually present as strong and as complete an argument as I can. Perhaps even eliminate the argument all together by simply proving my point. So here it is.

The war in Iraq WILL FAIL. Therefore it is safe to claim that it already has. The imminent looming of complete disaster is so certain that to say that we’ve failed now and save ourselves the trouble later is the best course of action. I’ll give a little background on my point of view at this point. As a kid I had a pretty idealistic view of the military. I often thought of joining the Air Force because I loved the idea of flying and I thought that it would be a noble way to learn how and to help serve my awesome country. The first war I ever remember growing up through was the Gulf War in 1990. Thinking back on that I was 8 years old at the time. I knew president Clinton had ordered the troops to deploy in Kuwait, and I could follow what happened pretty well at that age, and that was probably the first time I realized that if a war like this happened again I’d have to kill people as a pilot in the Air Force. That kinda disturbed me but I also recognized that we were protecting this small country from an invading force, just like my grandfather was protecting the US from Japan in WW2. That was something I could live with.

As I got older, naturally I kept growing, and it wasn’t until high school that I found out that I was too tall to be a fighter pilot like I had always wanted. I still had a pretty high opinion of the military, and when a military recruiter, Sgt. Archer, talked to me about joining up with the military straight out of high school I had to think twice, because my military career of choice was already out the window, but there might be other options because I’m particularly intelligent. I told Sgt. Archer that if he could find my house then he could come talk to me. Well sure enough, only a few days later, who shows up but Sgt. Archer on my doorstep looking sharp as a tack with all his stuff, and he pitched his whole spiel to me, and I took his little test (aced it well into the military intelligence requirement level), and he told me how the military would pay for my college and provide me with a paycheck and do all these wonderful things, but I’ve always been a gentle guy, and since my revelation in 6th grade that I wanted to write and play music professionally, I didn’t really feel like such a rigid lifestyle was right for me. Especially since I couldn’t be a pilot.

Well, I decided to instead take a year off from school and do some thinking, during which time I worked as a movie extra, and used the money I made to go to Hawaii with my sister, which was a really fun time for me. This was in January of 2001. I ended up enrolling over the summer at UT El Paso to earn a music degree and become a composer, but I had never really closed the door on the military option. I had always wanted to be a boyscout and I never found the time to join, but the military was so much more prestigious to me than the boyscouts.

Anyway I moved out to El Paso for summer band and goot back into the swing of playing trombone, which I always had fun with as part of an ensemble, but not so much alone. It remains so to this day. Anyway, I started up at school in El Paso and barely a month into the school year, 9/11 happened. The border to Mexico closed for probably the first time in history, and after it reopened getting to Mexico was so much of a hassle, all my plans for actually going there and having a fun time went out the window. I did well my first semester, but my second semester I started slipping down a slope into a bit of depression. There were a multitude of factors in this but eventually (one by one) I had dropped out of all my classes in my second semester and wanted to come home again.

As war raged on in Afghanistan, I reconsidered my ideas of joining the military and of calling up Sgt. Archer, because taking out the Taliban and Al-Qaeda for attacking us was the correct course of action, in my opinion. All of this had made me pay close attention to politics and especially because as I listened to President Bush talking about war and about attacking Iraq I thought… what the fuck? I didn’t think they had anything to do with this. Now… I’ve never had a very high opinion of Bush. I knew about his dad and thought his father was a bit of a fool and his VP was even MORE of a fool, and because GW became governor of Texas, I knew who he was long before he became president.

Now, Anne Richards was the first Texas Governor to really bring the office of governor into my circle of awareness. I don’t know who any governors of Texas were before her. I thought she did her job well, she had a great sense of humor and she was really smart a great leader. Then I find out that this guy George W Bush is running for office, and Anne Richards, the governor whom I admire really has a low opinion of this guy. Honestly I agree with Ms Richards’ opinion of him at the time. I didn’t know she was a lesbian at the time, nor would it have mattered to me because I still would have voted for her if I could, but I think that fact contributed to her losing the governor’s race in adition to the fact that she badmouthed George W Bush. In any case she lost and HE became my governor. Everything that Anne had done right he seemed to be doing wrong, and he never seemed particularly bright to me.

Then something that completely ruined him in my view happened. Not only did his policy begin to ruin the school system in Texas, he said

"I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?"

"I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" Essentially in that speech he heavily implied that there were no POOR and HOMELESS people in Texas which is ludicrous. I worked with homeless people every year as part of Art From the Streets homeless art show and I know all about poor hungry kids. Then he further ruined his reuptation by vehemently attacking Al Gore in the 2000 election and LOSING and then winning anyway through voter fraud, but we let that one slide because Al Gore was a noble contenter and conceeded victory to Bush to avoid a drawn out confrontation. Gore +1, Bush -29387.

Still… I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt. I figured he was a moron, but I figured he was a harmless moron, and all we’d have to do would be to clean up after all his failed policies and start over with someone new in 2004. I would never have been prepared to experience the extent of how much of a total fucking asshole Bush could be. It never occured to me. 9/11 happens, he has a hasty knee-jerk reaction and finally decides to go after Osama Bin Laden when Clinton had left clear warnings that Bush should do this when Clinton left office as detailed in this beautiful interview : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvUIwa1rkNU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J58gKXTgrjI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCfj6tK-ftk

Between 2001 and 2003 I really began to form my identity as a pacifist. That was something that helped me decide not to join the military, and in hidsight I’m glad I didn’t. When I say I’m a pacifist, I mean it in the sense that Albert Einstein did during WW2. While I believe that there should always be peace first and foremost, I recognize that there are people like Hitler who are going to disturb that peace and pose an iminent threat to everything we stand for, and those people MUST be fought of necessity. That’s why it is necessary for us to have a military at any given time, and for us to keep it strong in the event that another Hitler comes around. Bush, during this time, seemed to think that Saddam Hussein, like Hitler, posed an iminent threat to all of America, but I just didn’t see it. I never saw any of the "evidence" that was shown to members of congress, or the fabricated Italian intelligence report that proved there were WMDs in Saddam’s posession, to convince them of Saddam’s threat, but I never believed that he was capable so soon after the Gulf War I remembered so well to actually pose any threat to us. If he attacked us, we’d know it and we’d CRUSH him with the full support of the rest of the world. No brainer.

Now, to compare Saddam to Hitler… that’s a fucking joke. Saddam ruled as a despotic warlord using fear tactics to barely hold power in a region rife with people just like him, where Hitler was a very charismatic and inspirational leader utilizing very clever and manipulative ideologies to both recruit support and garner nationalistic spirit under his fascist ideology. It was utterly frightening the way he was able to convince young Germans that they of the Aryan race were vastly superior to the rest of the world and that they should dominate it. Saddam was a fucking chump compared to Hitler. Look at the failed war against Iran in the 1980s. He may have killed almost twice as many Iranians as Iraqis that died, but he had to use chemical weapons on his own people to get them to shut up and used heavy-handed fear tactics to quiet opposition rather than the smoothly subversive propoganda of Hitler’s youth. Hitler was a far better murderer than Saddam. That didn’t excuse Saddam in the least but surely it meant that he was of no threat to us.

Needless to say I was horrified that we declared war on Iraq pre-emptively in 2003. Any thoughts of joining the military quickly left my head at that point, because Bush was the first person to make me fully realize the role of Commander-in-Chief. See… the Gulf War I remembered had gone so smoothly that I never fully realized that a civilian was in charge of the whole thing. President Clinton. Bush made this PAINFULLY obvious, and continues to every day. I was opposed to the war in Iraq from the beginning and I am even more so today.

Some people seem to think (and this was prevalent during early stages of the war) that if you didn’t support the war, that you didn’t support the US military and all the young men and women fighting and dying for you. This could not be further from the truth. At all. See, I was madly in love with this girl named Shoshana (this is documented heavily in the earliest entries of my OD) and she after 9/11 joined the military and she ended up in Afghanistan. I fully supported her decision and I was even somewhat proud of her for serving such a just purpose. Now she wasn’t a combat troop she was a veterenary spcialist, and she did things like help dogs wounded by shrapnel, and castrate a sultan’s horses, and she did very noble things in a justifiable conflict in Afghanistan. I could totally live with that. I still have a place in my heart for her, even though I’m sure it would never work out between us, but she’s military and I think it’s great. I supported her decision and I appreciate what she’s done.

Similarly, a lot of my friends from high school ended up in the military like Ross Casey, Jimmy Wise, and Luke Manley. All 3 of those guys joined the marines and ended up in Iraq. I still support their decisions, and I still love those guys dearly, but it pains me to think of why these guys ended up IN Iraq to begin with. My bitterness and lack of support is not directed to my friends who followed their orders brilliantly and did their jobs every day, it is directed towards the JACKASS who gave them such horrible orders, and that would be Bush. It is the president’s power to declare war, and that’s precisely what he did in Iraq. That’s also precisely where he went wrong…. (to be continued in next entry)