America is suffering. At least 37 million people in this country live in poverty; the current prison system is a veritable stage for institutionalized racism; health care, education and welfare programs continue to be drastically under-funded and global warming threatens to wreak widespread havoc within the next decade. Each of these enormous concerns deserves time, money and attention until they have been suitably dealt with.
Unfortunately for America, that can’t happen until the illogical and devastating War in Iraq is over.
We shouldn’t even be in Iraq in the first place. Our presence there is solely the result of a war-hungry and stubborn president itching to show off his executive muscle in the face of the tragedy of 9/11. Today, the war is a full-blown catastrophe, with well over half the American public saying that the United States should have stayed out of Iraq according to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in May.
Maybe the American people have begun to realize that President Bush’s supposed goal of democracy in the Middle East is misguided at best. In Edward Said’s 2003 preface to his 1978 book “Orientalism” Said reminds us that democracy and modernity are “by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find, like Easter eggs in the living-room.”
The United States is in Iraq for purposes of our own control. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dying for our arrogance and selfishness.
The War in Iraq is not necessarily the biggest threat to this country in and of itself. Moral corruption and outside image aside, there are many Americans who are not visibly affected by the War. Those who enroll in the army today frequently have no financial choice: They are too often men and women who don’t have the money to go to college and choose the army because they’ve hit dead ends everywhere else they’ve turned.
But all of us are being duped. In late May, Congress passed a bill giving $100 billion to pay for military expenses through September: and more than half of American tax dollars were already going to fund the military according to the Budget of the United States Government for 2008.
More than half.
We deserve better. We deserve to see our money being spent on environmental action; education; bigger, bolder solutions to U.S. poverty: not on advanced missiles and massive tanks. We deserve to be part of government that values high-quality human life; not one that funds the propagation of death.
I have a lot of hope for and pride in America. This is the country where Martin Luther King, Jr. is given a national holiday; where there are more applicants for the Peace Corps than there are available positions to serve in it; where free speech and public protest are not only legal, but often encouraged. For everything awful this country has come to represent, it has enormous potential to truly be the land of the free.
But not if the U.S. continues to confine and torture detainees at Guantanamo Bay; not if we casually kill civilian Iraqis by the thousands; not if we insist on fighting a war grounded not in freedom, but in imprisonment.
President George W. Bush has made a lot of unforgivable mistakes in his two-term presidency. His biggest, of course, has been his stubbornness about the War in Iraq: He reminds me of a kid at a science fair with a failed baking soda-and-vinegar volcano, pouring more and more vinegar into the base, insisting to a weary audience that it will explode any minute. He refuses to believe the problem runs much deeper.
In 2008, I want first and foremost to see a president who has the courage to put a swift end to this War. If a mistake is made, I want to see a president who will listen to the American people and take careful action to change course. The President of the United States of America must above all be an adept listener. This is a country not run by one person, after all, but a community of millions who elect one to be their spokesperson; and the American people want the Iraq War to come to an end.
