Thursday, August 23, 2007

George Bush: An Even Worse Historian
Than He Is President?


George Bush recently compared Iraq to ... Vietnam.

He said that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to widespread death and suffering, as it did in Southeast Asia three decades ago. Here's the Washington Post story.

Bush may not have noticed it, but there's already widespread death and suffering in Iraq.

And is this the only lesson Bush learned from Vietnam? That we got out too soon and should have stayed longer?

Remember that Bush (unlike John Kerry and Al Gore) did not bother to serve in the Vietnam War, preferring instead to skip out on his National Guard service -- as only the spoiled grandson of a U.S. Senator could -- so he could concentrate on beer bongs and God-knows-what-else.

Memo to Bush: This may be a good time to reflect that as many as 700,000 innocent civilian Iraqis are already dead because of this unnecessary war in Iraq.

A study that appeared last fall in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the War has led to 500 Iraqi deaths a day, or 655,000 souls as of last October.

Nobody knows the exact number of Iraqi deaths, but even if this were half the amount, say 325,000, it still amounts to the entire population of, say, the city of Cincinnatti, and is 10,000 times greater than the number of souls lost on 9/11.

This is tragic. The deaths aren't American lives, so for some reason it doesn't outrage the large masses of American fundamentalist conservative christians, but can God-fearing Americans really think that God differentiates between American and non-American lives, or prioritizes one race/nationality as greater than others?

America makes up only 5 percent of the world population. I want born-again American Christians to repeat that 10 times: America makes up only 5 percent of the world population. I also want these Christians to repeat (also 10 times) the following phrases:
  • Jesus was not an American.
  • Jesus had dark skin, just like those 700,000 dead Iraqis.

It would be unreasonable to say that, in God's eyes, American lives are more important the lives of non-Americans, right? Right?

I wish born-again Christian George Bush, back in 2002, had been more concerned with "saving the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians with the same skin tone as Jesus" as he was about "oil profits" before starting this disastrous war in the middle east.

A battle-tested man like John Kerry -- who knows what it's like to kill a man in combat, a man who saved lives in combat and "accomplished missions," a man who withstood the pressures of enemy fire -- knows the true lessons of Vietnam, in a way that George Bush -- who cut and ran from his military obligations -- never bothered to learn.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ask yourself a question: Our American troops are not killing the Iraqis--so who is the enemy? No, we shouldn't be in Iraq, but Bush and Americans are not responsible for the greatest number of deaths of Iraqis (and both those numbers you cite are way off according to legitimate sources--religious fanatics are and they'd kill you and everyone who believes in freedom if you give them a chance. I don't disagree with TCOJ on the war--I disagree on who the real enemy is and how one day you and I won't have the freedoms to debate this. Read "The Kite Runner" and that will give you an idea of what the fanatics will do to a civilization.

Anonymous said...

I wish I had time to protest the meanness and spite behind TCOJ's post today, but I'm late for church, and we're voting today on the next carpet-bombing and genocide. Cause that's what christians do. Right?

Tom Weston said...

That was a very brave post. It puts things well into perspective.