Luke Melia

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March 16, 2003

3/16/03, 11:20 pm – He’ll Have His War

Bob Herbert writes in tomorrow’s NY Times, “The president’s mind was made up long ago and all the chatter pro and con was just so much smoke in the wind. Mr. Bush will have his war.”

It looks that way. As I stood underneath the Washington Monument on Saturday, in a crowd of fifty thousand people or so, I reflected on the UN diplomacy process. Even if the disarmament goal had been attained, that would not have been enough for the Bush administration. Bush’s goal from the beginning has been regime change, and more to the point, the establishment of an influential American presence in the Middle East.

I yelled a lot in these past few months, loudly, with millions of others throughout the world. We insisted that we win without war, that we make diplomacy work. It appears that nobody in our democracy was listening, at least nobody with the strength or balls to make a difference.

The charade of diplomacy is has fallen apart like a shitty off-Broadway play. Our goodwill of the world has been squandered in a more wasteful and unfortunate way than the economic surplus. At least Americans had three hundred lousy bucks to show for the stupid tax cuts. What do we have to show for the goodwill spent on this war? Do we feel safer now? Will my Manhattan neighbors feel safer once a war begins and we have heavily armed police squads in the subways? Will we be safer in America once we have an American general calling the shots in an occupied Iraq?

Forgive my bitterness. I love the America built by the great men and women who came before us. I hate to see our government bumbling and fumbling as it leads that America to a dangerous destination. But it looks like we’re about to bumble out of the phase of token diplomacy and bumble into the preordained agenda of killing and invasion.

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