Dangerous Foolishness

P. T. Barnum attributed his commercial success to the maxim that one would never go broke overestimating the intelligence of the American public. In other words, no matter how smart you think the public should be, chances are they are more stupid than you think; and there is profit to be made from such stupidity. He built his wealth on the belief that you can fool most of the people most of the time. Today we are faced with a more macabre circus with a ringmaster that appears to be applying those same principles. The salient difference is that Barnum’s product was relatively harmless amusement [albeit with some arguably inhumane treatment of people with deformities in his sideshows], while the current ringmaster, George W. Bush, sells war and bloodshed. Few would agree that the staggering and climbing death toll from the Bush Follies is amusing or entertaining.

President Bush spoke to the nation on September 11 and urged the country to unite behind his “struggle for civilization” against the Islamic terrorists who want to kill us and destroy our way of life. He tells us that the struggle in Iraq is a “critical front” in the “war on terror” and that progress is being made. His Administration spokesmen assure us Iraq is not descending into a civil war. Yet each day we receive independent reports demonstrating that the White House is lying to the American people about the magnitude of the chaos and killing. The current situation certainly fits the definition of a chaotic civil war, regardless of the label or spin that the White House would place on it.

US military can do little to secure region in western Iraq. The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western al Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents… The officials described Col. Pete Devlin's classified assessment of the dire state of Anbar as the first time that a senior U.S. military officer has filed so negative a report from Iraq… One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, "We haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically - and that's where wars are won and lost." [Washington Post, Sept 11, 2006]

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Police recovered 60 bodies over the past day across Baghdad, most bound and tortured, officials said on Wednesday, highlighting how sectarian death squads are still plaguing the Iraqi capital despite a major security drive... The Health Ministry has yet to publish its complementary full data for other violent deaths in August. Figures for July put the total at more than 3,000 people, concentrated in Baghdad, where more than one in four Iraqis live. [Reuters, Sept. 13, 2006]

The American military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks including suicide bombings when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday. [Associated Press, Sept. 12, 2006]

Perhaps some elements of the fundamentalist right have bought into the modern day “Crusades” policy, that the US has the God given mandate to rescue the people of Persia and Mesopotamia from heathen godlessness as European Christian soldiers believed in the Middle Ages. In retrospect, we see that religion was simply a tool used by the ruling class as an excuse for conquest and colonization to exploit the wealth of the regions attacked. That paradigm seems to be equally at play in the Bush policy. Certainly, the current economic elite have no need to buy into the religious mythology when they can busy themselves with shoveling in profits derived from US government expenditures on war making at the rate of more than $6 Billion per month.

Less myopic analysis shows that the Bush foreign policy and the invasion of Iraq have caused enormous loss of life, destruction of homes and displacement of millions of people, loss of standing and respect in the international community and growing hostility against the US around the world. The cost of admission to a Barnum & Bailey circus was about a half week’s wages during depression times, an amount most families could ill afford. But the cost of the Bush Follies threatens to mortgage our children’s future and permanently taint this country’s reputation.

But the question that is still perplexing is why the rest of the country has either bought into or acquiesced in this fallacious enterprise. Is it that we have been so heavily bombarded by false information and messages that we are unable or unwilling to see the current situation as it really is? Has the educational system in this country degraded to the point that the average American lacks the intelligence to connect the dots and recognize that it has been and is being duped? Or are we simply living proof of the P. T. Barnum saying? Did we not learn this lesson from past experiences, including the Viet Nam catastrophe?

But there is another saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!”