The Iraq Exit Strategy! or Why Only Saddam Hussein Can Save Iraq and the USA !
A Satire (or is it?) by James Boyne
The answer may sound crazy but Iraq is a crazy place; the predicament that President Bush has gotten us into is crazy; and the solution to the problem of extricating ourselves with honor from the quagmire of Iraq is crazy.
The answer is to turn Iraq back over to Saddam Hussein; let him have his one-candidate election with him as the principal candidate; and let him re-establish his rule over Iraq . It seems perfectly logical; as logical as the situation that exists right now.
Before the Iraq invasion, defeat, liberation, and subsequent disastrous occupation the U.S. maintained complete control of Iraq airspace through our enforced no-fly zones. This provided us with total aerial photo intelligence the likes of which no sovereign state has ever submitted to. We also controlled the Iraq economy and its sole source of revenue and income through the mandated U.N. sanctions and the U.N. oil for food program. We had also destroyed more than 50% of its military capability during the first Iraq War, Desert Storm in the early 1990's.
Invading Iraq was the equivalent of buying an old junk heap or a clunker of a car. We bought Iraq (by invading it) and now we are stuck with it.
We can't even get the oil out of it to pay for its reconstruction and now American taxpayers are stuck with the, in all likelihood, $500 billion bill before it is all over.
We invaded Iraq because Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Now we find out that he had none. We have searched every nook and cranny in Iraq . We have scoured every cave, school, palace, warehouse, military facility and restroom, with thousands of elite special operations troops, Predator drones, and high tech equipment and have not found a single plan for producing, planning, launching or hiding WMD. Even Geraldo Rivera has given up looking for WMD. The most Geraldo found was a bottle of rubbing alcohol with some Q-Tips next to it. So, weapons of mass destruction is a non-topic. In spite of the fact that Bush and Dick Cheney claim that we have only covered 99.99999% of Iraq and still have a lot of ground to cover, it does indeed seem to be growing doubtful that we will ever find any.
We mistakenly thought that most Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein and would welcome us as liberators and would embrace democracy in the way that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams did during the American Revolution. Boy, were we wrong. Why were we wrong?. Its easy to figure out. Saddam Hussein, in his 5 year war with Iran sent hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their death in what was basically a re-creation of World War I with trench warfare and the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of young Iraqis. Saddam just sat back and smoked his Cuban cigars and enjoyed the fun of warfare as he built his palaces and enjoyed he good life. Hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi men that would have loved freedom were now dead.
After the Iran/Iraq war Saddam Hussein spent much of his time tightening his grip on the Iraqi people by torturing, repressing, and murdering thousands more who dared to utter a word against him or question his democratic policies of torture, repression and murder for all, regardless of race, religion, creed, ethnicity, or sexual or political orientation.
The same CIA , US State Department, and National Security Council that were 100% positive that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were also 100% positive that Saddam would not invade Kuwait in 1992. They were wrong. He did. This is not a good record for the Intelligence Services of the most powerful and technologically advanced nation on earth. All those involved in this most disgraceful failure have been promoted, re-elected, or been give medals of commendation for exemplary service. This is the way America works under the Bush administration and under the Republican controlled Congress and Senate that want to turn America into a militaristic, right wing, extreme Christian-morality-based theocracy.
The first President Bush, President George Herbert Walker Bush, Sr., totally destroyed more than 50% of the Iraqi military, sent it high-tailing its ass out of Kuwait, and in a ground war that lasted 100 hours that culminated in the "highway of death" where thousands of Iraqis (both civilian and military) were bombed into oblivion, leaving corpses that were cooked to a degree that can only be described as "well done".
Saddam Hussein, seeing total destruction, devastation, and annihilation all around him declared victory. We accepted OUR defeat with lots of yellow ribbons tied around trees, parades, and flag waving ceremonies. President Bush, Sr. also encouraged and incited the Shites in southern Iraq and the Kurds in northern Iraq to rebel and overthrow Saddam and implied that we would come to their rescue and help them with covert support to get the job done. We even set up a 'no fly" zone so Saddam couldn't use the airspace in his own country. This was of little value in stopping Saddam from crushing the rebellion with poison gas attacks, massive ground offensives against rebellious villages, and the normal torture and murder of thousands more freedom loving Iraqis.
By this time if there was a single Iraqi left in Iraq who knew what democracy, freedom, or capitalism was, he or she was probably in prison ready to be thrown in a vat full of acid.
Then came 9/11. Nineteen fanatical, Islamic terrorists boarded four jumbo jets where the cockpit doors were flapping open and shut so anyone could pop into the cockpit and demand to fly the plane themselves. Their main obstacle was to get the pilots and passengers to take them seriously since, as usual, the main complaint was when the little bags of peanuts would be distributed.
Upon hearing that our nation was under attack on 9/11, Bush, who was reading a bedtime story to a bunch of 3rd graders, high-tailed it out of the school (leaving class early) and secretly flew to Nebraska to try to make sure that his ass wasn't in danger and to try to figure out what to do, since someone told him he was Commander in Chief of not only the 3rd grade but of the entire United States of America.
One of his first initiatives was to give Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban enough warning time that we were coming to get them so that they could get the hell out of Afghanistan and flee to Pakistan, or one of a dozen other secretive, hostile, barren Muslim countries (like Ethiopia, Tunisa, the Sudan, Madagasgar and Jersey City); or one of the 20,000 caves that dot the roadless countryside of Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Uzbekistan, Syria, Iran, the Antarctic, the Polar Icecap, and the underground New York City subway system. We never did find Osama or the head Taliban guy, Omar.
Bushes second initiative was to climb upon a pile of rubble from the collapse of the World Trade Center, force a firefighter to submit to letting the President put his arm around him and utter one of the most profound statements ever made by a President, "we are gonna get da folks dat knocked da buildin's down". The nation was speechless. This was our leader. It is a statement so profound that it should be inscribed on the monument at ground zero.
After the total defeat of Afghanistan, which basically consisted of the occupation of the capital of Kabul and the resurrection of Afghanistan as the preeminent grower of poppy plants for the production of enough heroin to supply most of the drug addicts in the world, Bush declared victory since one or two women were spotted in Afghanistan in miniskirts and without their traditional Birkas. Also, satellite TV dishes were being sold in the marketplaces even though no one in Afghanistan had a TV. They apparently thought that the satellite dishes showed the TV images.
So here we are today. We have been in Iraq for over a year since "Mission Accomplished". The Iraqi's loved us for about one week during the time when they were allowed to loot and pillage their own country. Once they learned that democracy stood for law and order and that corruption, bribery, and lawlessness weren't allowed they didn't like us anymore.
Compared to Saddam Hussein, the Americans (yes, that's us) were a bunch of wimps and pansies. The worst we would do to them was make them take their clothes off and pile onto each other or make them wear hoods, which isn't much different than wearing a birka or a long hot robe with a turban and no underwear underneath.
In turn, they capture our contractors and cook them alive and string them up and hang their charred bodies from bridges. Or they behead American contractors who are over there looking for employment because there sure as hell isn't any employment here with 9 million newly unemployed and another 9 million long term "discouraged" unemployed.
The oil that would flow from Iraq after we achieved victory or "mission accomplished" was supposed to drive down the price of a barrel of oil to $29. Instead the price has risen to over $40 a barrel and gas is at an all time high. Another minor miscalculation!
We were supposed to be welcomed as liberators and embraced as the saviors of Iraqis yearning for freedom. Instead, we are greeted with machine gun fire and RPG rounds that blow the arms, legs and heads off of us, the liberators.
We need to give Iraq back to Saddam Hussein, and Saddam Hussein back to Iraq . Only he can get the oil flowing again. Only he can get the price of oil back to $29 a barrel by smuggling, bribery, intimidation, extortion and manipulation of the flow of oil through the fraudulent control of the United Nations oil for food program. Bush is still a novice at these arts, though he's learning, with practice.
Only Saddam Hussein can probably figure out where Osama Bin Laden is hiding and turn him over to us. He will undoubtedly use prisoner abuse considered slightly more coercive that the laughable photographs of a few Iraqi prisoners frolicking in the nude with Halloween hoods or women's panties covering their heads and being led around on a dog leash. With Saddam you would be thrown in a vat of acid or taken out back and shot in the head, even after you talked and they got the "intelligence" out of you.
If we wanted to torture Iraqis with nakedness and nudity, I'm surprised someone in the Bush administration didn't come up with the idea to send them all to a Florida nudist colony for a few weeks of "torture" being forced to sunbathe in the nude.
Only Saddam Hussein can reinstall the Bathist Party with the "deck of cards" guys and bring back the Iraq that Iraqis grew to know and love. Only Saddam can restore order.
Saddam Hussein is our "exit strategy".
We can revert back to the "no fly zones" and the constant UN inspections looking for WMD. It seemed to be working just fine. When Saddam Hussein was the leader of Iraq at least we could be assured that the only terrorist in Iraq was Saddam himself.
Here in America we have 45 million people with no health insurance. Most of them are working people, not poor people from the cities ghettoes or form Appalachia .
We have over 18 million people out of work and looking for work. We have millions of people who are working at jobs well below their educational level. We have millions of people who are working part time because they can work full time.
We have record high bankruptcy filings---1.6 million people last year.
We went from a Federal surplus of $500 billion to a $500 billion Federal deficit in two years. We just spent $200 billion on the war in Iraq with 700 soldiers killed. We don't know how many Iraqi's we killed but it is easily in the many tens of thousands. We don't bother to count the dead Iraqis. They don't matter.
We have a President who spends nearly all his time campaigning in order to be re-elected to an Office to which he was never really elected in the first place. We have a war that is costing $1 billion a week.
We have a President who just gave $350 billion back in tax breaks to people who don't need tax breaks as much as the Federal Government needs the money to balance the budget so our economy doesn't collapse.
We have a President who just initiated and passed a Medicare reform and prescription plan for seniors that was billed as costing $350 billion over five years but is now estimated to cost $550 million where most of the money will go to the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies with seniors getting extremely limited cost savings and many losing all their prescription drug coverage altogether from their private employers.
We have a President that thinks that sending American jobs overseas to India, China, the Phillipines, and Mexico is good for the Americans that lose their jobs----and their homes, their security, their life savings, their hopes for their children's education, and their future retirement. Even military jobs are being outsourced to private contractors and "mercenaries", all at the taxpayers expense.
We need to put that statute of Saddam Hussein back up in the center of Baghdad with the same exuberance that we tore it down. We need to put all the roadside billboards, pictures, and paintings of Saddam back up throughout Iraq . We need to rebuild all his palaces. We need to reinstate and promote all those wonderful leaders from the "deck of cards". We need to let Saddam adopt two new sinister, murderous sons to replace Uday and Qusay that we killed. Saddam seems like a flexible, understanding man. Maybe he will accept two young serial killers that we can release from one of our prisons. Possibly we can give him Charles Manson and the Son of Sam to replace Uday and Qusay.
Only Saddam Hussein and the wonderful people of Iraq can save us and let us regain our own freedom; American freedom; the freedom to get back to our priorities----employment (or the lack of it, health care (or the lack of it), education (or the lack of it), the economy (or the lack of it), the exploding trade deficit, the imploding health care insurance crisis, stratospherically priced prescription drugs, gasoline selling for over $2 a gallon (after we have conquered one of the most oil rich countries in the world), millions of seniors (who have seen their retirement funds evaporate), and hundreds of thousands of active military personnel and veterans that live on poverty wages and benefits that are an insult.
James Boyne dboyne@aol.com is a satirical, political freelance writer and has five other articles published on www.opednews.com. He has previously been a diehard, staunch, conservative Republican who has voted for Goldwater, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, and now has made a 180 degree turnabout and supports the candidacy of Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who appears to have the most integrity, honesty, common sense, straightforwardness, enthusiasm, optimism, and "fire in the belly" to be possibly the best President in recent memory. He is a progressive, populist, liberal, Democrat and is a man of principal, intelligence and experience. Mr. Kucinich comes from a humble background and clearly spells out his positions on issues on his web site www.kucinich.us so there is no question where he stands on issues.
**It is the responsibility of all Americans to vote. You should know where all the candidates stand on different issues; why they believe what they do; how they plan on carrying out their plans (rather than just empty promises); and get a sense for their character, honesty, commitment, integrity and their vision for America and for the world. You should know what their background is. How did they get to where they are now. Know their life, and you will know them.
Other Articles By James Boyne on www.opednews.com:
President Booosh: We Are In A Pickle
Whoops! Billion Dollar Cancer Drug Found to Cause Cancer To Hasten Death
Bush: The Greatest Liberal of the Century
"So Rush Just Wanted A Rush"---the Media Gives Rush Limbaugh a Break
Was I Globalized or Circumcized? (What It's Really Like To Get Laid Off)
