I watched C-Span’s “American Journal” show the morning the news broke about Tami Salicio being fired by Maytag Industries for taking photographs of flag draped coffins of the American dead in Iraq. Host Brian Lamb requested calls specifically from active and veteran military personnel. One, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, had no problem with the picture. “It shows respect,” he said. The images showed the flag draped coffin surrounded by guards standing at attention. He added, “But I think they should also keep showing those two planes hitting the towers.” The “war on terror” as a phrase has become our national junk drawer. Everything gets thrown into it. Even pro-choice activists are, according to Karen Hughes, at least in a figurative sense, terrorists. Bush uses the phrase so incorrectly and so opportunistically that it no longer has a focused definition. It is foreign policy so cluttered and knotted that the thrust of the Bush reelection campaign is national discombobulation. He theme may as well be, “Who better to untangle this mess than the ones who got it tangled in the first place?” You know the list: weapons of mass destruction; the cost of the war; the benefits of tax cuts. That Bush carries the demeanor of a swaggering juvenile at the mall and has gotten away with so many blatant lies while still commanding the support of the religious right is also no longer a surprise, since Biblical literalists are accustomed to being devoted to a God who destroys civilizations with floods and casts plagues upon peoples. To them, it’s a black and white world, and it’s a whole lot easier to believe in someone who is decisive, no matter the cocksure certainly has not been tested by logic or accountability. I must credit ABC News for participating in the semantic decluttering. Eight stations airing “Nightline” were told by their parent company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, not to air the April 30th episode in which Ted Koppel read the names of all the Americans killed in combat in Iraq. Sinclair declared this an ABC stunt, a biased against the war effort. The network denied this and defended it mission to provide balanced reporting: “ABC News will continue to report on all facets of the war in Iraq and the War on Terrorism.” ABC rightly considers the two wars separate. I think of them this way: The War on Terrorism is a wife. The administration is publicly committed to this one above all. But this wife is complicated and requires a subtle, long-term commitment. The testosterone driven Bush administration is more attracted to the Iraq, the mistress. Iraq is an easier, more obvious courtship, for there was nothing nuanced or complicated about Iraq, with its borders and old-fashioned dictatorship. Bush called Osama “the evil one” for the first six months. It’s a great, black-and-white catch phrase, and brings to mind WWII posters of gremlin-like, evil Japs and pathological murderers like Hitler. Stalin-like Saddam better suited this “evil one” catch phrase, making Iraq the Mistress the more attractive encounter. Just over a year ago, with the Mission Accomplished banner whipping in the breeze on the aircraft carrier, Bush was nothing more than a country club lothario bragging about his hot one night stand. Trouble is, he didn’t get away with it. Iraq became his fatal attraction. Now, this administration is so tripped up in its convolutions that it calls its wife its mistress and vice verse, and on top of that, it takes up the typical defense of the guy caught red-handed: Deny everything and act like everybody else is crazy If Bush is serious about being the deliverer of God‘s will, he will find a way for Michael Powell to pre-emptively abolish John Kerry’s TV ad campaign. It would be for the good of the nation. In the War on Terror, the country would not be lead into temptation to consider an alternative to God’s will. There’s really no reason to debate anything since all the hairs on our heads are numbered. And for those in uniform, our days. I explained the war in Iraq to my children by making up a parable. “It’s like your best friend at school broke your favorite CD in half. Then to get back at her, you came home and beat up the cat.” They had to think hard about it to understand the simple logic -- but they got it -- which is more than I can say for the likes of that C-Span caller.
So it really doesn’t matter that Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. And it doesn’t really matter that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. George W. Bush justifies the invasion of Iraq because, he says, since 9/11 we must act pre-emptively. Apply that Bush doctrine to the war on crime and he would mandate abortions in neighborhoods that are most likely to produce crack-selling gangs. (Or, because he is against the right to an abortion, and because his record in Texas shows him much more gleefully comfortable as state executioner, imagine bad preschoolers being marched to the gas chamber so they won’t grow up to commit street crimes.)