- Arthur Miller, not my favorite playwright, is nevertheless
opening a new play in Minnesota, "Resurrection Blues," which
attempts to satirize the vicious and absurd state the world has gotten
itself into recently.
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- And the world certainly has ventured into the absurd.
Marxist guerrillas setting off bombs to protest the inauguration of Colombia's
new president kill mostly the poor in Bogot slums. We, of course, kill
500,000 Iraqi children because they (presumably the children) won't overthrow
Saddam Hussein.
-
- Saddam's neighbors say publicly and directly to the president
that they oppose an American attack and do not feel threatened by Saddam,
and how does the president reply? In the most absurd fashion, like a dummy
cut off from all outside communications, he says, "Saddam is a threat
to his neighbors," while 6 feet away one of those neighbors, Jordan's
King Abdullah, had come specifically to urge Bush not to attack Iraq.
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- When I look at some of Bush's statements I find it impossible
to imagine Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower making
them. I cannot imagine any of the three flatly contradicting a guest in
the presence of the guest on a matter of fact on which the guest obviously
has the most direct knowledge. How does Mr. Bush know better than the king
of Jordan that Iraq is a threat to Jordan?
-
- There is no end to absurdity. Mr. Bush's position is,
in a screwball way, a compliment to Saddam Hussein. Deterrence worked against
Josef Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in human history, even
though he was armed with a million times more weapons of mass destruction
than Iraq, but, in Mr. Bush's view, it will not work against Saddam.
-
- Then, too, there is the absurdity of the United States
simply deciding on its own that the government of a sovereign nation has
to be changed by force. How would you feel if the president of China announced
that the United States was part of an axis of evil, was a threat to its
neighbors, had gassed its own people (Davidians at Waco) and therefore
China was going to see to it that there is a change of regime in the United
States?
-
- The other day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld simply
stated, without any evidence, that members of al-Qaida are in Iraq. A few
facts: The government of Iraq is secular and views Islamist fundamentalists
such as al-Qaida as vermin; The New York Times has reported that some outside
fundamentalists, possibly al-Qaida, have moved into the Kurdish areas of
Iraq. The Kurds, split among communists, nationalists and fundamentalists,
are "America's allies," with an 80-year-history of failed revolts
- not a few of them because the United States cut and ran, as the CIA did
most recently in northern Iraq.
-
- I personally was glad to see that Saudi Arabia flatly
said "no" to any American military action against Iraq based
on Saudi soil. When we have a president who seems unable to listen to advice,
who seems almost inhuman in his ability to repeat obvious falsehoods, then
we have to rely on other countries to force some restraint.
-
- We have no reason whatsoever to go to war with Iraq.
Iraq is not a threat to its neighbors or to us. No evidence whatsoever
has been found linking Iraq to any terrorist act against the United States
in the past decade. And who governs Iraq is none of our business.
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- I don't know what the real reason is for Mr. Bush's determination
to go to war with Iraq. Probably it has to do with oil. Iraq has more oil
reserves than any country on earth except Saudi Arabia. If it could get
its oil production back to its prewar level, the world price of oil would
certainly drop. It can't get its production back up, however, because we
won't allow it to buy the equipment necessary.
-
- In retrospect, I wish we had had a better choice in the
last presidential race. Our foreign affairs should not resemble the theater
of the absurd.
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- http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20020812/index.php
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