The rhetoric between the United States and Iraq gets louder, and we inch ever-so-slightly closer to the inevitability of war. In 1990, our mission was defined, our objective was clear, and we had the backing of most of the civilized world. Today, our allies are abandoning us like rats on a drowning ship. The people that didn’t like us before are rattling sabers and threatening to turn this thing into yet another worldwide affair (see North Korea). Even our own generals, like Anthony Zinni, are saying that attacking Iraq now is a bad idea. And yet, it looks as though this administration is hell-bent on doing just that.
I want to know where all of the Clinton-bashers are now. All those people who shouted “Draft dodger!” during every election. The same people who used to ask, “How can a man who never served his country ask other people’s children to go off and die?” are strangely silent. Nobody is saying that about Dick Cheney, who spent the ’60s riding student and marriage draft deferments while other people his age were having their guts blown out in Vietnam. Trent Lott, Joe Lieberman and Tom DeLay never fired a shot in anger, either. And yet theirs are the loudest voices of all calling for a unilateral first strike against Iraq.
President Bush, however, did serve in the Texas Air National Guard. The VietCong would have had to attack Lubbock for Bush to have seen action. I’m not disrespecting the National Guard, but remember, Bush got in the National Guard at a time when it was extremely difficult to do so.
Professor Rodolfo Acuna of Cal State Northridge recently said, “Bluster comes easy if you never had to pay the price.” As long as these guys can send this country’s soldiers into the belly of the beast without the fear of their own progeny dying, then cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war.
Do not be misled. War now is the same thing war has always been: people with guns and stuff trying to kill other people with guns and stuff. Despite our Geneva Conventions, our moratoriums, our haughty sense that we have evolved far beyond the barbarity of earlier epochs, war is still war.
Before you buy into the rhetoric coming from these windbags, think long and hard about what it is they are asking for. Their kids will not be standing side by side with you ready to put their daddies’ words into action. You may be called upon to go across the ocean to a place you’ve never seen to fight and bleed and die. Is that something you are willing to do?
Tony Odom is a graduate student in the history department.