The Poet's Eye 
                    commentary by Lightning Rod

the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgemental

Declare Love
04-19-04

"No lives should be lost in Iraq unless Congress expresses the clear will of the American people and votes yes or no on a declaration of war." Congressman Ron Paul

The last time I looked at Article I of the Constitution, it said that Congress has the power to declare war. But the Constitution isn't what it used to be, The Patriot Act pretty well took care of the
first ten Amendments, why not give the President the power to commit troops indefinitely?

To be sure, a President has to secure a certain amount of public approval for such adventures as invading Iraq. The propaganda departments at Bushco advanced the semi-plausible notion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the security of our shores because he had weapons of mass destruction. Plus, he was just a real bad guy.

I don't know whether our intelligence apparatus imagined that Saddam had a nuclear bomb. But they knew that we had annihilated his airforce during and after the first Gulf War. Did they think that he was going to strap this mythical bomb on the back of a camel and march that camel across any of the three oceans that separate our countries or what? Anyone with over a third grade education should have been able to see that Saddam was no threat to this country other than the fact that he was sitting on the oil tap.

One could reasonably ask, "What about Korea or Pakistan or China or Russia or Ukraine or Israel for that matter possessing known weapons of mass destruction?" And I'm not talking about a few vials of nerve gas or a couple of dime bags of that pesky anthrax. I'm talking about nukes that can level a city. Shall we invade them? It would surely make the world safer.

And Saudi Arabia is hardly a democracy, why don't we invade them to end the evil, one family monarchy that rules that country? It's because the autocrats that run Saudi Arabia are already co-opted by the oil companies. They may be sand niggers who cut peoples hands off in the public square and stone women to death, but they are OUR sand niggers. They understand the rules: Mi petrol es su petrol.

The Poet's Eye sees that territorial conquest is the only reason for the invasion of Iraq. If we were really interested in WPM's there are numerous other countries that we KNOW possess them and we have not invaded them. There are numerous other repressive and undemocratic regimes in the world and we have not invaded them.

This is an odd sort of territorial conquest, very similar to the Belgian and Dutch colonial enterprises in Africa. There were agricultural uses for the land but the real object of the colonialism was resources, things under the land. In the same sense Bushco doesn't care about the land of Iraq or the people. What they are interested in is what is under the land.

Bushco has what it came for--the oilfields are secure and being guarded by corporate police. The last thing that this administration wants is to get embroiled in the ethnic fighting that is bound to ensue when US forces leave Iraq. Even less do they want the Sunnis and the Shi'ites and the remnants of the Baath party to unite and make life difficult for them until the 'transition.'

The Poet's Eyes looks askance on the practice of issuing sovereignty at the point of a gun. This charade of passing power to some official body in Iraq doesn't fool the Iraqi people, or the rest of the world. Everyone knows that whatever governing body is installed by the US military will be a rubber stamp organ. We are constructing the largest, most heavily fortified embassy in the world in Baghdad. I'm sure Pontius Pilate would have envied it.

And then the Christians came with their siege machines to take back the Holy Land. Those catapults and the trebushet looked much like oil derricks rolled to the walls of Islam. The broadsword met the scimitar and the Moslem World united against the infidel. The Crusades were much like Bush's war in the Mid East. They were inspired by commercial lust and financial problems at home. It was like the Medieval 9/11 wrapped in holy zeal to expel the heathens from Jerusalem, a grand distraction from the fact that Popes and Kings were taxing the people blind.

Enough history. Another hundred Americans have paid the flat tax for the greed and arrogance of our government in the last month. The media has become very skilled at putting a human face on many of these sacrifices. This war is even more in our living rooms than was Viet Nam. It's only a matter of time before The Heartland tires of it's sons coming home in body bags at the rate of five or six a day.

Undeclared war
and
Undeclared love
one lasts too long
the other not long enough.

•

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