LONG DISTANCE WAR

Are there any other nations who are at war and don't notice it? In the United States, we've been at war for over five years and nothing about the feel and experience of being an American in America has changed. Is it just me or shouldn't there be some daily sense of a war being waged in our name? Shouldn't something about everyday life be different? Why is there no major impact on society one way or the next? It's almost like the Iraq war is a bad TV show a lot of people want cancelled but it keeps getting renewed, and that's about it!

It's true that a lot of us are outraged that Bush The Younger attacked Iraq in the first place, a nation with which we had no quarrel. We are further outraged that he let the guy who did attack the United States off the hook. That would be Osama bin Laden, a member of the bin Laden family that has shared decades-long business ties with the Bush family. He even flew members of the bin Laden family out of the country one step ahead of the FBI in the immediate aftermath of Osama Bin Laden's devastating attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. Presumably one of those flying out of American investigators' reach was Osama bin Laden's brother, Shafig bin Laden, who was being entertained by the president's father, our former President Bush The Elder, at Washington D.C.'s Ritz Carlton Hotel the day before the attack.

The bin Ladens are Saudi nationals, and Saudi Arabia provided 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks. So another puzzling fact is that many members of the Saudi royal family were also secretly flown out of the United States along with the bin Ladens. This was during those first weeks after the attack when you and I were not even allowed to fly so much as a kite. Wouldn't one think the investigators charged with unravelling the chain of events leading up to this attack might have a question or two to ask a lot of these people? And wouldn't one further think that the United States would have to reassess the close ties we have with Saudi Arabia? Or at least have our President Bush The Younger refrain from holding hands with Saudi princes like high school sweethearts? That behavior is blatantly shoving it up our asses that that rich and powerful oil magnates can do as they please, kill who they please and make friends with whom they please, even if they enemies of our nation.

Would Franklin Roosevelt have done the same for members of Emperor Hirohito's family on the heels of Pearl Harbor? Did he break off the attack on Hirohito's Japan to attack a different country that had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor? Did he form a mutual admiration society with Japan's allies, entertaining them lavishly and excusing their open financial and material support for our enemies? The answers to those questions would be no, no he did not. He pursued our enemies to the gates of their capitals and galvanized the nation to join in the effort. Although our enemies were many and their armed forces very powerful, they were crushed completely in less time than Osama bin Laden has been free since he attacked America, only three and one half years.

And even though the Second World War was not fought on American soil, the entire nation knew every single day that there was a war on and that it was far more important than anything else going on in America at the time. The world was in danger, our nation had been attacked and the whole country united in the effort to overthrow totalitarianism. No one again dared attack America until Osama bin Laden, almost 60 years after Pearl Harbor. And Bush The Younger put his defeat and capture on the back burner in order to attack Iraq. Bin Laden was off the hook, able to effectively regroup in Pakistan, another so-called American ally with a government almost as odious as that of Afghanistan's Taliban and Saudi Arabia's tyrannical royal family.

And America shrugs. We are being ruled by a criminal elite who are using their war of aggression and their fear mongering for the purpose of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the working class to the very wealthy, to the point where less than 1% of the population owns over 90% of our nation's wealth. The war we are supposed to be fighting, the war against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and now Pakistan has been given a low priority. The focus remains on Iraq, where 20 to 30 million dollars worth of oil is being stolen every single day. Conveniently, the oil meters on the wells and pipelines have been broken ever since the United States invaded Iraq. Of course the Bush Administration blames in on insurgents and corrupt Iraqi officials even though that country and their oil industry has been taken over by the United States, Halliburton and Blackwater, not necessarily in that order.

There is also 9 billion dollars in American currency shipped over there that cannot be accounted for. Bush The Younger's mouthpieces blame in on crude Iraqi accounting methods, as if they would have us believe that Iraqis are illiterate and backwards shepherds who's only counting system is a handful of stones representing each of their sheep. Sorry, but Iraq was and is an educated and sophisticated country quite able to keep track of its own oil industry and any amount of currency. It's only since we invaded and started blowing up a lot of their infrastructure that the country is in dire straits. As painful as it is to say so, Iraq was better off when Saddam Hussein was in charge. Fewer people died at the hands of his regime than under American attack and occupation and the entire surrounding region was more stable than it is today. And still America shrugs.

When the Viet Nam War was being waged, also an unpopular and unnecessary war, the nation was quite aware of the war and it was part of our everyday consciousness. Boys from every neighborhood were being drafted to fight, protests over the war were common and the entire nation openly debated its merits. Directly or indirectly it cost two presidents their jobs and divided our country as never before. Perhaps the bitter memories of those times when the nation was at each other's throats makes many of us hesitant to revisit those emotions. Time and perspective have shown us that it was a bad war for a bad cause and standing up to our government to stop it was a right and viable thing to do.

Sometimes patriotism is best manifested by opposing the actions of your government. Those who sought to stop the war loved America every bit as much as those who supported it and supported the administrations of the two presidents who waged that war, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The anti-war faction was not seeking the overthrow of the American government, they were simply insisting that the American government live up to its charter, the United States Constitution. We now have a president with a bunch of henchmen who holds our constitution in contempt and claims powers that it never granted him. The abuses of Richard Nixon pale in comparison to those of Bush The Younger, a man considered by many, this writer included, to be a criminal surrounded by criminals. He is attempting to shred the Bill of Rights, has started an illegal war of aggression against a nation that did us no harm and has allowed the torture of prisoners of war.

These are heinous and treasonous acts perpetrated by a sitting president, and there are too many other criminal deeds committed by his administration to list here. The man should have long ago been impeached and now should be under arrest and awaiting criminal trial, not preparing to leave office and handing over a new president the nightmare of undoing the damage he has wrought, as if his were simply another bad presidency. Well, his presidency has not been the case of a bad job done in good faith, it was a series of calculated criminal acts punishable by the same laws he swore to uphold. The violation of that oath and the sacred trust of his office is unprecedented in American history and should not go unpunished.

President Bush the Younger has been an enemy of America and should be treated as such. Not only should he be punished with jail time for the actual crimes he committed, he should be vigorously prosecuted as a warning to any other person seeking the presidency of this nation. Let them be aware that we have a Constitution that specifically outlines the power of the presidency and the behavior of our government towards its citizens. We are a nation of laws and every person, especially the president who swore a sacred oath to uphold those laws, should be held accountable for their violations.

But that's not going to happen. America will continue to shrug, the illegal war devastating Iraq will remain a long distance curiosity and Bush the Younger will go away next January. Our next president will be knee-deep in the shit this man has left behind and our nation will be in debt for generations to pay for his crimes. There has never been a lesser man in the office, and we've had our share of poor presidents. But what we have had for over seven years is a corrupt and manipulative gang of criminals undermining America from within, from the very height of power. They are are enemies of America no less than Osama bin Laden and equally deserving of arrest, trial and punishment under the laws of the United States of America.