A nation of fools

President Bush and his pro-occupation supporters are gleefully singing the magnificent successes of “the surge” — the increase of U.S. troops in Iraq intended to bring “stability” to the country.

What I don’t understand is that if the surge has been as successful as they say it has, then why did President Bush have to keep his recent trip to Iraq secret, why did he fly into an isolated U.S. military base in Anbar Province rather than into Baghdad (where the surge was), why did he stay a grand total of 8 hours in the country, and why didn’t he walk the streets of Iraqi cities and towns accepting people’s gratitude and praise for his having brought “democracy” to Iraq at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqis?

Didn’t Napoleon and Santa Anna remain with their troops through thick and thin?

I wonder how many of Bush’s pro-occupation supporters who are singing the praises of the surge have signed up for vacations in Iraq? My bet is none. Of course, they couldn’t plan to visit any Iraqi museums since all those were ransacked during the U.S. invasion of the country.

Another option for surge celebrators would be to simply join the U.S. armed forces and volunteer to be deployed to Iraq, but I’m willing to bet that all of them take the same position that Vice President Cheney took when his peers were being sent to Vietnam — they’ve got more important things to do here in the United States than to fight to defend our freedoms and our national security.

I read in the New York Times that Air Force Captain Nick Sloan volunteered for Iraq duty solely for financial reasons — to get the tax-free income to pay off his $68,000 debt. Wow! What greater and more nobler cause to kill and die for than that? If Sloan has to kill an Iraqi, I wonder what he’ll say to God on Judgment Day.

The surge celebrators are ignoring a critically important thing: In terms of morality, any measure of the surge is quite irrelevant. No U.S. soldier has had any moral right to kill even one single Iraqi because the U.S. government had no right to invade or occupy Iraq, given that Iraq never attacked the United States. He has no moral right to kill anyone for the sake of “stability,” regime change, order, or any other political goal.

Meanwhile, the Congress, preoccupied with the bathroom activities of Senator Larry Craig, has yet to show any interest in conducting a full, complete, and thorough investigation into the torture and sex-abuse policies and practices of the Pentagon and the CIA.

Federal spending continues out of control, especially on the U.S. military-industrial complex and the permanent occupation of Iraq. That includes the $600 million being spent on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which is about the size of the Vatican.

Our country is heading toward a very high cliff, and federal officials are taking us there. At least some of us are resisting the trend, while others are happy, smiling lemmings singing the praises of their leaders.