Iraqi War Continues to Unravel

Picture George W. Bush as that little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike. Then another hole appears. And another one. And another one. What’s the poor little Trust Fund Boy supposed to do?

51% of the public thinks the Iraqi war was not worth hundreds of billions of dollars or the lives of over 1,600 American soldiers. (Too bad they didn’t decide that seven months ago.)

And now we all know that the reasons for invading Iraq were totally fabricated. Bush and his English Bitch were planning the Iraqi invasion in 2002. They conspired to fix the “intelligence” around their plan. The ever-shifting emergencies — Weapons of Mass Destruction, connections between Iraq and terrorism — were nothing more than scare tactics to whip the masses into a war whoop.

So he lied and finagled to get us embroiled in a war with a country that wasn’t a threat to us. This war has turned a budget surplus into a record deficit and killed over 1,600 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Can he keep these holes plugged up? Daddy? Karl? Uncle Dick? Oops, more water coming in.

There have been reports of sleazy recruiters, using lies and even threats to “persuade” people to sign up. Everything from covering up students’ criminal records, to providing overweight students with laxatives so they can lose enough weight to pass the physical, to threatening a student with arrest for skipping an appointment with the recruiter.

Recruiters have to meet a certain quota or they go back to the front lines (at least that’s how it was when I was in the Navy), so you almost can’t blame them for being desperate. It’s a tough sell. Who wants to have their tour of duty in Iraq “extended” indefinitely, and be sent into battle with insufficient armor and ammunition? And then finally you come home from Iraq to find you’ve lost your job and you can’t declare bankruptcy because the law just got changed so that banks can crack down on deadbeats like you.

At this point most recruiters are probably wishing for an easier assignment, like selling ice at the North Pole.

The No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to provide students’ names and addresses to recruiters; this is not sitting well with some people. Now some high schools and colleges are debating whether to even allow recruiters on campus. And the pro-war types are reacting with fury at the schools for even considering this.

Are we getting polarized yet? Soon we may have massive campus protests and riots against the war in Viet Nam, er, I mean Iraq.

Uh oh, another hole in the dike: Soldiers are going AWOL from the Iraqi war in much higher numbers than previously estimated. The official Pentagon estimate is 5,133. Unofficial estimates are much higher.

Look out, there’s more water spurting in over here: Returning soldiers are being diagnosed by the thousands with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. By one estimate, more than 10,000 soldiers have sought help for this condition. Nightmares, flashbacks — it’s Viet Nam all over again. The Viet Nam war drove Lyndon Johnson out of the White House. How much longer will Bush be able to cling?

(There used to be a joke about the flashbacks of a Viet Nam draft dodger: “You hear gunshots and you think it’s a car backfiring. And suddenly you’re back at this coffee house in Toronto.” But I digress…)

With everything unraveling around Bush, one of two scenarios is bound to happen: 1) Bush will start frantically yelling “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Or 2) Rove will invent a new hot-button issue to whip the masses into a frenzy and distract them from the Iraqi disaster.