How We Failed OUR Democracy

Twenty years from now, we will take a look back at this period in American life with disbelief and regret. In a Kabuki dance, the American public failed the American government, and the political parties—Democrats and Republicans alike, failed the essence of our democracy. History will not be kind to our generation, where we allowed an attack on our homeland to be used as a pretext for an ill conceived war, the three branches of government colluded in the misuse of trust and power, and the fourth estate meekly enabled an administration to lie to the public and exploit frayed nerves into a war of choice and a conflict of calamity. It goes without saying the harshest judgment lies at the feet of the Bush administration. After September 11th, Bush had an opportunity to coalesce the country under one purpose. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were not an attack on a political party nor on a religious faction, it was an attack on all of us. The banality of red state versus blue state disappeared for a day; the red blood of innocent victims was the state of our nation, and the blue color of sadness was the state of a collective loss of innocence. Instead, the images of lost lives, broken families, and charred out buildings was used as a blunt political tool--a day of tragedy morphed into 30 second political ads. A nation, unsettled and shaken to our core, was encouraged to go shopping and to buy stocks; devaluing the lost lives by placing primary importance on the valuations of Wall Street. Shortly thereafter, our collective anger and individual disquietude was manipulated by steady drumbeats on the path to war. Driven by an administration who viewed September 11th as an opportunity to initiate a war plan drawn up years before the first plane hit the first tower, we attacked a nation—based on a superfluous pretext—that neither attacked us nor posed a threat to our country. Unable to admit failure and transfixed on protecting a failed legacy, Bush imperils our soldiers as they stand grounded in the deserts of a broken civilization refereeing an Uncivil War; the red blood of our GI’s and innocent Iraqis the state of a shattered Iraqi nation. The Bush administration’s inept and aberrant designs notwithstanding, the Democratic Party’s feeble and duplicitous acts of civil subservience will not escape the reaches of historical memory. For every act of treacherous, there is an act of silence; for every deed of trickery, there is a deed of self-suppression. In choosing complicity over courage, they disserted their post as the guardians of our republic. Fearing being labeled cowards and libeled as unpatriotic, they chose to proudly forswear their solemn oath to protect the Constitution from external and internal enemies. Those that hand the keys to an inebriated driver stand just as guilty for the eventual repercussions that follow—action and inaction are one in the same when lives are lost as a consequence of both. They stand before us today, those that cast their vote—and their lot--with a dogmatic ideology and a misbegotten war. It is true that victory has a thousand fathers, and defeat is an orphan—but history will remember whose DNA is embedded in this war’s inception. In an unprecedented ceding of congressional oversight, the Democrat’s went along with the Republican rubber stamp’s imprimatur in signing a blank check to the executive war. George Bush today could attack another country without consulting congress based on that war resolution. These very Democratic malingerers stand before us today, so far doing NOTHING that would deem them worthy of the voters’ trust, a trust given not out of confidence but out of dejection in the Republicans’ performance. Some even speak of running for the presidency, which I’m sure they will be extolling the vices of this administration while ignoring their aiding and abetting that very administration. One who forfeited their congressional duties cannot be entrusted with the solemn duties of the presidency. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, and all other Democratic member were presented with three years ago was the ability to displayed distinction and political courage, instead most chose weakness and political expediency. They stand complicit in this Iraqi fiasco; their vote is embedded in the DNA of this Iraqi debacle. The lack of fortitude does not end with the supposed loyal opposition. The fourth estate’s ceding of their duties was just as abhorrent. The fabric of our nation is woven with an informed citizenship, the threads of veracity and guardianship of our rights entrusted to the press. Where our elected officials fail us, our press is supposed to act as a lighthouse, guiding the ship of the state from the peril shores of dictatorial bureaucracy. Our republic is maintained through the notepads of the journalist, the microphone of the reporter, and the ink of the press. The press is supposed to be a vigilante, arousing public sentiment to overcome governmental corruption. Instead, the vigilante became the cheerleader; their notepads turned into an instrument of diction, their microphones morphed into an echo chamber, and their pen ran yellow—spreading lies from power instead of speaking truth to it. Perhaps this is what happens when a free press is consolidated into a conglomerate, where the policies of the government it is supposed to oversee affects the bottom dollar of the various media's parent company. When a newspaper or news show has to answer to Wall Street as much as it answers to Main Street, we have a recipe for a press devoid of valor and derelict in its duties. The sad truth is that we as a nation failed our nation; we are stuck in a war where all options are dire. We stay and feed the flames of a Civil War, our very presence feeding the flames of hatred that threatens to engulf the whole region. Pull-out and we leave behind women, children and men to be massacred by a virulent enmity unleashed by our occupation. While it is immoral to leave an iniquity created by our own malfeasance, staying there does nothing but extend the day of Sunni and Shiite reckoning. We are in effect acting as a balancing scale, the longer we stay the longer we give a chance for the Shia to train and arm themselves to a point where they will be able to slaughter Sunni into submission. We leave today, and we embolden the Sunni establishment, which still have the technical know-how and the military prowess, to slaughter tens of thousands of Shiites on their way back to a minority ruling class. We are at a Faustian fulcrum, where our action or inaction will become the catalyst for a Kabuki dance of two sects determined to settle old scores and set the table for a new sectarian dominance in Iraq. Meanwhile, our Kabuki dance continues, debating the meaning of Civil War; and a new catchword—“bipartisanship”—is bandied about to yet again fail our democracy.

Uncommon Sacrifice and Exceptional Valor

Of all the specious talking points which are spewed on any given talk shows by the Bush sycophants, the most injurious of them all—and most un-American—has to be the “we hit them there so they don’t hit us here” propaganda. It misses the point to argue that Iraq had nothing to do with 911, in order to grasp the true mendacity of that statement, all one has to do is turn on a television set to see the face of the dying men and women of our nation.

The cute game they play is one of word association: we hit them in Baghdad so they don’t hit us in Boston, we hit them in Mosul so they don’t his us in Missouri, we hit them in Hadithah so they don’t hit us in Houston. Besides the obvious malevolent statement of discounting Iraqi lives, the sheer audacity of these talking points is that it attempts to throw a veil over our eyes. The truth is that we are being hit everyday; as we commute to work, some GI’s mother in St. Louis just received word of her son’s violent death in Samara. As we sip a morning cup of coffee from Starbucks, a wife in Topeka just learned of her husband’s maiming by an IED in Tikrit. While we shop on black Friday, a child in Nashville just learned of his father’s passing in Najaf.

While death and carnage is shown everyday in Iraq, we somehow manage to go on with our lives. The faces of the fallen on television has become a fact of life to most of us, we have become desensitized to this war and it’s depravity. Today I saw a television show on Fox where three men were actually debating the value of this war on Wall Street. One actually said “Wall street likes that fact that we went over there…go big and get the job done, Wall Street likes decisiveness”. One’s man’s loss has always been another man’s gain, but one hopes that cynicism and greed have their bounds—apparently they does not.

Our nation has always been at its greatest when we pulled together for a common cause. World War II was exemplary of our shared sacrifice, when the nation gained and lost as a whole. A mother in Boston was just as worried about her son as a mother in Baltimore, a wife on Wall Street was just as fretful as a wife on Main Street. A soldier from a small town was looking forward to hugging his kids as much as a soldier from a big city. The burden was mutual, and victory was a collective mission. Unfortunately, after 911, we were told by our President to go shopping, to spend, to go on living like we have not been attacked. And so we glance occasionally at the death and horror of a tragic war, while continuing our daily life unencumbered by the burden of our nation’s bloodshed.