The Daily Grasshopper

While picking up the newspapers on Saturday morning, I took one look at the front page of the Boston Herald and saw that I had plenty of material. There, in full color, was our President, George W. Bush, addressing U.S. soliders at Fort Hood, in his home state of Texas. Bush wore a GI flight jacket with his last name over the right breast and the words “U.S. Army” over the left. Arrayed behind him, in a sea of camouflage green, are some of the soldiers who will be called to make the ultimate sacrifice in the weeks and months (and years?) to come, if Bush succeeds with his plan to wage endless war. The caption for the photo is “Firing up the troops.” Memo to troops: you won’t be wearing green where you’re going.

Some of you already know how I feel about President Bush’s qualifications to be our Commander-in-Chief. For those of you who don’t: he has absolutely none of the moral authority required to send young Americans to war. In the early 1970s, when men like my father (two tours in the late '60s) were slogging through the swamps in Vietnam, Bush was partying his way through a stateside assignment with the Texas Air National Guard, thanks to his well-connected family. Being “W” certainly has had its privileges, and becoming president without being able to communicate intelligently is just one of them. Of course, Bush (and many of the men he has surrounded himself with) wasn’t the only member of America’s elite to skip serving, but none of those other silver-spoon-sucking cowards is “firing up the troops” in Texas this weekend. For a good overview of the “chickenhawk” administration of George W. Bush, check out this site, from America’s oldest newspaper, the New Hampshire Gazette:

http://www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html

The Boston Globe was decent enough to put Bush on the front page in his “civvies,” as my father used to call civilian clothes: he’s wearing the blue power suit of the corporate CEO, befitting his status as our first MBA president. The Globe also juxtaposed the picture of Bush (face grim as he fires off a salute to an anonymous soldier – the phony) with a picture of thousands of Pakistanis, rallying against the planned U.S. war.

Here’s what Bush told the troops to fire them up, according to the Globe story:

“Should Saddam Hussein seal his fate by refusing to disarm, by ignoring the opinion of the world, you will be fighting not to conquer anybody, but to liberate people.”

A nice fairy tale for the troops, and not surprising at all, because it would be hard to get them “fired up” if they knew some of the other motivations the Bush administration harbors. You won’t find much discussion of those in the front section of the paper, which is devoted to White House spin and the authoritative statements of anonymous Pentagon officials. But if you move back to the Business section, the reporting is much more honest about what’s going to happen once we “liberate people” in Iraq. This is from the front page of the New York Times business page, a story called “Energy-Rich Kazakhstan Is Suffering Growing Pains.” The report focuses on the difficulties that big oil companies (ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, etc.) are facing in this resource-rich region (where, coincidentally, we also have a large military involvement). The whole story is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/04/business/worldbusiness/04KAZA.html

Big Oil moved in after the Soviet Union collapsed and “carved out good deals for themselves in the early 1990’s” according to the report. Now the locals want to review those deals, angering the foreign investors. Check out the second-to-last paragraph:

“Despite all the difficulties, foreign companies are showing no signs of abandoning the rich reserves here. Competition for the investment dollars could intensify if Iraq’s oil fields open for development after a possible American-led war against that country, analysts said.”

Iraq’s oil fields open for development? After a possible American-led war? There are two phrases you don’t see side by side in most reporting on “Showdown With Iraq,” or whatever the major networks are calling this farce nowadays. Allow me translate that sentence: Big Oil is going to abandon Kazakhstan in a New York minute (“Competition for the investment dollars could intensify”) for the much more lucrative option of getting in on the ground floor in a “liberated” Iraq, which has the second-largest petroleum reserves in the world (after Saudi Arabia), oil that is relatively easy to refine and transport.

The Bush administration’s connections to Big Oil are pervasive, and well known, for those who care to investigate. A good overview can be found here (in the foreign press, naturally):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1138009.stm

So, the Chickenhawk-in-Chief is soon to send America’s men and women in uniform to “liberate people” in Iraq. A lot of Americans that I know have very strong reservations about the timing and necessity of this proposed war. Men like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and, of course, George W. himself, seem untroubled by these sorts of doubts. That’s probably because it’s not their blood that’s going to be spilled on the sands of Iraq. It will be the blood of men and women like my father, who didn’t just wear the U.S. Army uniform for a photo-op. And who served honorably, and in the belief that the men whose orders he was following were doing the right thing. When George W. Bush’s country called on 9/11, he was ready to go, dropping bombs, moving aircraft carriers, “firing up the troops,” and sending many of them (Hundreds? Thousands?) to certain death.

When Bush's country called during the Vietnam War, he had more important things to do. He’s a disgrace.