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This being an election season, we get inundated by poll results, telling us that Rollie Heath isn't quite as far behind Bill Owens as he was a few weeks ago, or that the Strickland-Allard senate race is tighter than than the Colorado job market.
Those numbers seem to comport with the world we live in, but then they announce the national polls about major issues, and always these come up with something like two-thirds of all Americans surveyed say they support the President's plan to use military action against Iraq.''
And I've got a question for the pollsters: What planet are they taking these polls on? Here in America's great conservative heartland, deep in red Bush Country, I haven't met one person, even among the hard-core Republicans I encounter, who is eager to see the United States invade Iraq. When I talk to friends in other states, from New Mexico to Montana, they tell me the same thing -- they haven't heard anyone say Let's invade Iraq, the sooner the better.''
The United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by al-Qaeda, which had been able to operate from Afghanistan under the protection of the more-than-repressive Taliban regime. We attacked Afghanistan to drive out al-Qaeda, and along the way, Afghan women regained their right to go outdoors. So far, so good.
But how do we make the jump from attacking al-Quaeda in Afghanistan to attacking Saddam Hussein in Iraq? Where's the connection? If it's al-Qaeda we're after, going to war with Saudi Arabia would make more sense -- after all, most of the hijackers had Saudi roots, Osama bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, and the money trail leads to Riyadh, not Baghdad.
So even if it was al-Qaeda that attacked us, the Bush Administration seems bent on going to war with Iraq, whose connection to al-Qaeda is tenuous at best. If there's any evidence that al-Qaeda had been operating as an agent of Saddam Hussein, I sure haven't seen it.
Let's go back about a dozen years, to the administration of Bush the Elder, who also wanted to rally Americans for a war against Iraq, which had invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. That Bush regime kept trotting out new reasons to go to war -- territorial integrity, American jobs, Kuwaiti babies being pulled out of incubators by Iraqi soldiers, security of world oil supplies, that Saddam Hussein was worse than Hitler,'' etc.
Eventually, that Bush crew managed to talk Americans into supporting the Gulf War, and Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait. A defeated Iraq agreed to allow weapons inspections and to observe no fly zones.'' With American encouragement, Iraqi Kurds rose against Saddam Hussein, and without American support, they were mercilessly slaughtered by Iraqi forces.
Given that history, you have to wonder just how dangerous the Bushites really think Saddam Hussein is. If Hussein was really worse than Hitler,'' as Bush the Elder told us, shouldn't he have been taken out in 1991 when we had an army on the ground?
After all, in 1945 when the real Hitler was in Berlin, the Allied western front didn't stop at the Rhine with the announcement that We've liberated France from Nazi occupation, so our job is done.'' Nor did the Red Army halt at the Oder River and proclaim that since the Motherland was now freed of the Wehrmacht, it was time to demobilize. They both continued the war until Hitler was eliminated.
The Gulf War did not continue until the worse than Hitler'' was eliminated. Saddam Hussein was left in power. There was no regime change.''
So what's changed since then?
There is the argument that Iraq is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, and so a pre-emptive attack is in order. It's not a new argument; in 1949, when the United States learned that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb, U.S. Sen. Eugene Millikin, a Colorado Republican, proposed that America take therapeutic measures'' against the Russians.
If therapeutic measures are in order on account of Iraq's nuclear possibilities, then why not apply them to North Korea, too? That's different, we are told, since North Korea hasn't invaded anybody for 50 years, whereas Iraq has attacked Iran and Kuwait in the past 20 years.
This distinction seems rather specious, given that the President put North Korea into the same axis of evil'' as Iraq, along with Iraq's frequent enemy, Iran. It seems odd that he can equate them in one speech, and in another, single out Iraq as the only one deserving an American invasion.
The world would likely be a better place without Saddam Hussein (likely, not surely, because a replacement might well be worse). But it's a big jump to go from that to let's invade Iraq,'' no matter what the polls say -- polls that appear to have been taken on Mars.
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