What If The People Say No?

If George Bush and his neoconservative friends were to cover Edwin Starr's famous hit single, how would it go?

"War - Huh! Good God! What ISN'T it good for?!"

It's good for winning elections. It's good for silencing dissent. The wars we're fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are also good for making Bush and his buddies filthy rich. War keeps us scared. Up until recently it kept us compliant.

War isn't good for everything. It's not good for the unlucky young people who have to die in it, or the civilians who get blown to smithereens. It's not good for the refugees or the veterans or the people who will be left behind after it's over. It's not good for America.

Soldiers anywhere will tell you; waging war makes you love peace.

I wish the Neocon cabal who so blithely drove us into this hellish nightmare could go to Iraq, spend a night or two out on patrol, die a little for their country.

The president fought the Vietcong in Texas and Alabama by getting laid a lot, driving a nifty sports car, ducking out of his military service, drinking like a fish and sniffing all the cocaine he wanted. Dick Cheney waved off his duty during wartime with multiple deferments and "other priorities." There is no one close to the oval office who can speak for plain reality, who knows what war is. Especially as everyone with the integrity to speak the truth to power has, in our wonderful "new American Century", been fired.

War is hell.

That is, unless you don't have to fight, or send your children, or sacrifice in any way. Unless it makes your portfolio soar.

I hope the vets, when they are eventually allowed to return from their multiple deployments, don't remain silent. They were sent into the maw of death by Bush and the Neocons, think-tank neurotics with grand ideas how to get other people's children killed exporting "democracy."

The veterans are slowly coming to understand that they've been tricked, that Iraq had not a blessed thing to do with 9-11, catching Osama bin Laden, or terrorism. If it wasn't about oil it was about Oedipus, a private thing between a father president and his shallow, man-child president son. A war veteran can smell bullshit a mile away and can't be spun by propaganda so easily like the rest of us. Combat veterans have long memories and sometimes speak their minds when things get bad enough. History has shown us this.

Hopefully they will not be afraid to say out loud that they fought, they killed, they suffered for an arrogant, unnecessary "grand experiment" that never should have been undertaken. Or that they died in a live-action Republican campaign commercial. Or onstage in a Shakesperian tragedy. All are true. Take your pick.

We have to stop this man. Maybe his own soldiers can reach him. I personally don't think he has the depth to search his soul so someone will have to help him. He's made it clear he won't be listening to his daddy.

We owe it to the people we care most about to join together and remind our president that the will of the American people is not a thing to be trifled with, and that we will be heard. We do not want to kill and die in Iraq anymore.