THE VOICE OF THE RAGING MIDDLE By David A. Chodack There's nothing like a war to bring out the idiots and loonies on all sides, but this war seems to be something special. It's like a giant "Axis of Unreality", with three main factions, George W. Bush, his advisors and allies, Saddam Hussein his advisors and allies and the international  movement against the war and its advisors and allies, all waging massive public relations campaigns to get their point across to the world. But which world? Surely not this one. The problem is, none of them seem to have a realistic view of who their opponents are, or how to deal with them - except for the French and we will get to them later - yet they all seem utterly convinced that they have the situation under control and know just what to do. The fact that they have all been disastrously wrong so far and have all underestimated each other, doesn't seem to bother them at all. Everyone, on all sides, seems to be playing a game of 'Let's Pretend'. They all see what they want to see and nothing else, treating the war as a giant video game in which they  get to live out their fantasies and theories of how life should work and how important they should be on the world stage.  If the theories don't work, "Oh well", it's only other people's lives they're messing up.  No big deal.  Just press "reset" and start all over again. Forget about who is morally right, or morally wrong, these people just don't see reality the same way, as though maybe there are several parallel, yet very different, universes existing all at the same time, one for George W. Bush and his advisors, another one for Saddam Hussein and his advisors and a third and largely separate universe for many of the "peace" protesters here in the United States. And meanwhile, I find myself standing in the middle, filled with increasing rage and contempt for all sides, identifying neither with those in favor of the war, or most of those against it, feeling more and more like Alice after she fell into the rabbit hole. First of all, we have George W. Bush, the unelected President of the United States, the man who joined the air National Guard to avoid serving in war and his handful of aging armchair generals, none of whom ever served in war except for Colin Powell and most of whom were never even in the military, coming up with constantly changing stories about why we need to invade Iraq. So far, these have ranged from ties to Osama Bin Laden and his Al Quaeda network, to weapons of mass destruction supposedly threatening our survival, to upholding the integrity of the United Nations - even as we ultimately decided to defy the United Nations to go our own way - to finally, "liberating Iraq" and thereby remaking the Middle East into a democratic Paradise. Colin Powell, who should know better - having helped Bush I, lead us into Gulf War I -reportedly did know better.  Unless the American press has outright been lying and spreading antigovernment propaganda, then Colin Powell supposedly argued against the war and held out for a diplomatic solution.  Even scarier are the reports that most of the active generals agreed with him and none of them really wanted this war. Now that the war has started, it is already obvious that the rosy predictions were largely illusions as were the dire warnings.  Lo and behold, Saddam Hussein and his armies refuse to cooperate and play the war by our rules and our game plan.  Much to the seeming surprise of both our esteemed political leaders and the generals actually running the war, Saddam and his men have a game plan of their own, one for which we seemed to be largely unprepared at first. Yet, it's increasingly obvious that Saddam's men are desperate. They can't even defend their own capital, so how could they possibly be a serious threat to us? Almost everyone agrees that we will certainly win the war in the end and now that we are, Americans are all for it and even want more.  Let's invade Iran while we're at it (actually a much better idea than invading Iraq but that's beside the point) Unfortunately, no one seems to have any realistic idea of how long it's going to take, or what it's going to cost, in terms of lives or dollars and no one seems to have any idea at all, of how we win the peace, either in Iraq, or here at home, where we certainly could that hundred plus billion dollars to use rebuilding our own crumbling infrastructure. The idea that we will be hailed as liberators and heroes in Iraq and allowed to stick around and set up the new government to our liking, is beyond wishful thinking.  For better or worse, we are invaders.  The invaders may be hailed initially, when they overthrow an oppressive and hated regime, but they are rarely welcomed when they decide to hang around.  Even the Israelis, sworn enemies of all Arabs, were welcomed with flowers rather than bullets when they first entered Lebanon, because the people were sick of being oppressed by Yasser Arafat's thugs, but the welcome mat was quickly withdrawn and eventually, many years and many casualties later, so were Israeli forces. Meanwhile, surprise, surprise, we can't even control or deal with, the hostile coverage on Arab TV networks. Oh well, "Accidentally" killing a couple of their correspondents will take care of the problem. After all, it worked with the Chinese in Yugoslavia ……. Then there's Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi leadership.  They seemed confident right up until the last moment that they have could go on playing games with the U.S. and the U.N. inspectors. They actually counted on their friends, the French and the Russians, to prevent George Bush from acting on any of his threats and warnings and they obviously lost big time.  Yet they still seem to believe that a French and Russian-arranged cease fire is just around the corner Forget about whether the United States had the moral right to attack Iraq, or any credible evidence that Iraq did possess weapons of mass destruction, it was obvious that Bush & Co. were looking for any excuse for an invasion.  The last thing a smart dictator like Saddam wanted to do was provoke them and give them an excuse, yet that's just what he did. Saddam repeatedly took the bananas and waved them in the face of the 800 pound gorilla, knowing that the gorilla was on a very long and very weak chain that he could break any time he wanted to. Even now that the chain has broken and the gorilla is busy smashing them and their armies to pieces, Saddam and his inner circle still don't seem to have caught on, to the reality of what they've unleashed.  They are playing the Palestinian Game, starting a war they can never hope to win, with the expectation that the rest of the world will eventually bail them out.  That's a very wise strategy.  Look how well it's working for Arafat and company. Suicide attacks and soldiers in civilian clothes pretending to surrender will kill some Americans and British soldiers and slow the invasion down, but they won't stop it, not now that it started. Yet the Iraqi leadership still seems to believe this is Gulf War I and that at some point, the French and/or the Russians as well as the other Arabs, will tell Bush it's time to stop and go home and just like  his bought-and-paid-for father, Bush will listen. Well….. For better or worse, George W is not Big Daddy Bush, and this is not his father's war, but Saddam and company insist on kidding themselves that they're living in the past. They don't seem to recognize that this Bush is bought and paid for by different interests, with a different agenda that does not include keeping Saddam in power this time. And then, there is the "Peace" movement. On the international scene, you have "human shields" flocking to Iraq on the absurd - and ultimately racist - theory that Bush and Blair wouldn't dare bomb with them there (presumably because as egomaniacal Westerners, they were much more important to the world than mere Iraqis)   Then, they acted surprised when the Iraqi government tried to manipulate them and ultimately kicked most of them out of the country for failing to cooperate with Saddam's agenda.  Isn't it amazing how none of these neutral,  nonpolitical "Peace" activists ever volunteer to ride on Israeli buses or sit in the World Trade Center or other important American landmarks to keep them from getting blown up? And now at home, we have the geniuses who have decided to disrupt the country - starting of course with anti-Bush, anti-war cities like New York and San Francisco - as a way of protesting and presumably stopping, the war. Brilliant! They preen for the news cameras, showing off their ignorance, as well as their arrogance, with signs like "No Blood for Oil" - as if it's only selfish soccer moms in their SUV's and greedy executives who care about oil. Wake up folks. Oil is important to all of us who like food on our tables      (harvested by gas-powered machines and delivered almost exclusively by gas or diesel-powered trucks) and it would be a lot easier and cheaper to just buy the oil from Saddam if that's what this war was really all about  And then, there's the brilliant  "US and Israel Out of The Middle East"   "Peace" signs- as if  Sharon and the Israelis were  just sitting there nervously praying for us to take care of Saddam (just as they did in 1982(?) when they took out his nuclear weapons plant without our help or our blessing)  As if  they couldn't and wouldn't have easily and gladly taken out Saddam themselves, if George Bush was right and Saddam ever really was a serious threat. Meanwhile, the protests don't really hurt George Bush at all, since he is obviously not going to pay for all the overtime for Police and the other costs of the protests - not out of his own pocket, and not  out of his war time budget or his tax cuts either. Instead, we'll all be taking even more money from schools and parks and public transportation and all the things local governments could be spending money on, to pay for police overtime instead. All because a handful of people feel it's their right to make themselves heard at everyone else's expense. One little sweetheart was quoted as saying that she had no choice but to try to  make life miserable for ordinary New Yorkers. She had tried calling President Bush, but lo and behold, he wouldn't answer her calls! What a way to win friends and influence people, especially when everyone is already legitimately worried about the threat of terrorism. Impose your will on other people, whether they like it or not. Disrupt their lives in the name of a "higher cause", then expect them to see things your way and love you for it in the end. Hmmm, sounds like a page right from George W. Bush's book on governing Iraq, to me ….. Or, maybe the protesters really believe they are going to shut this country down and stop the war that way. A couple I knew once explained to me that they quit the radical movement when they went to a baseball where there were only about 10,000 people in a 70,000 seat,  almost-empty ballpark. "We realized there were a hundred times more people in that stadium than there were in our whole radical group and we were supposed to take over the world? It was ludicrous."  They told me. So they quit and became real estate millionaires instead. And who's going to come out of this whole mess on top, not only in one piece, but stronger than ever? Chirac and the French, the great peacemakers,  who wanted to stop this war about as much as Bush did. If the French really wanted peace, they would have done exactly the opposite of what they did - they would have supported George Bush in public and in the United Nations, putting maximum pressure on Saddam and letting him think the whole world was ready to crack down on him - while privately warning Bush of a veto. You have to give them credit for realism and pragmatism, if not the idealism and moral superiority they would so love to claim, these self-proclaimed leaders of the Europe and the world, who could not or would not solve Europe's own problems in Bosnia and Kosovo, but have just the solution for Iraq and the "Israeli problem" and never met an Islamic terrorist they didn't like  (unless he was Algerian and was caught trying to blow up the Paris Metro or something else in France) They are the only ones who seem to have looked at this situation realistically and so they figure to be the last ones standing at the end. They will wait out the war they tried so valiantly to stop - in public - without really risking anything and then, two years from now, when  the war and Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast and George W are all just bad memories, and the rest of the world is left cleaning up the mess that used to be Iraq, it will be Americans and American companies that will feel the sting of world-wide boycotts, while the French - and to a lesser extent the Russians - will be the darlings of the Arabs and get credit because they were the only ones who stood up to the imperialist madman and tried to stop the war. They really were, just ask them… BACK TO SOCIAL COMMENTARY PAGE HOME PAGE ….