I'm sick of the cliche of the "down-to-earth, average American." Time and again the coasts and major cities are labeled as out of touch or looking down from ivory towers. Fox News even has a show called "Heartland," tapping into the illusion that people on farms are somehow wiser on matters of foreign policy than those who have actually visited other nations.
So I'm going to make a bold statement here, one that will undoubtedly get me painted as a "liberal elitist": the average American is a fucking idiot. Now before you get all up in arms, I'm not saying that citizens of other nations are any brighter. I'm not an Englishman or Frenchman, so I can't speak to their shortcomings; I can speak to those of my countryman.
Far from being clearheaded, intelligent decision makers, the American populace is more like a retarded blind man in the woods. After bumping into about 20 trees, they realize they may be in a forest.
The evidence for this is fresh in the form of the Iraq War. Now that most people have wised up about the deceptive techniques used to get public support for the war, they are suprised and outraged. The problem is, the techniques weren't that clever in the first place.
I was against the war from the beginning, not for any love of Saddam Hussein or his rape rooms. The two things that stood out as red flags for me were the low quality of the evidence, and the potential strategic disaster a power vacuum in Iraq could create.
Speaking to the evidence, simply put, there was nothing that would have stood up in small claims court. All we had evidence of was that Saddam had some WMD that he had declared to the U.N. after the first Gulf War. These weapons were the kind that every nation with a desire to possess them could get.
In short, launching a war against Iraq to get some nerve gas would be like invading a nation to get rid of bullets. Everyone has them, and terrorists could get them from a number of sources.
This didn't matter to the majority of Americans, as President Bush trotted out the 9-11 boogeyman, linking Saddam to Osama and predicting that the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud over the desert. He had to use this colorful language because, in reality, there was no smoking gun. Hyperbole has been a strong point of this administration.
Secondly, there was no consideration of what happened the day after Baghdad fell. The majority of Americans seemed to think the Iraqi capital was Paris, and that the Iraqis would welcome Americans in. This with the fact that we had imposed harsh sanctions that, while manipulated by Saddam, did nothing but make life more difficult for the average Iraqi ever since the first war. Furthermore, no country likes to be occupied. Coupled with the insane religiosity of the region, it was a recipe for disappointment and disaster.
Over 2,300 Americans have now died in the Iraq War. It's estimated that 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. That number alone is equivalent to 10 9-11 attacks. Iraq is also a much smaller nation than the United States, making that number even more jarring.
So what should have been done about Saddam? Many people may have overlooked this, but weapons inspectors were back in the country before we attacked. They found nothing. No surprise there, as apparently there wasn't much to find.
It seemed that the president had grown weary of containment strategy. Unfortunately, he bought into the falsehood of a simple, one-step solution for the problem of Iraq in the form of a war.
It has been a disaster. Hopefully democracy can be salvaged for the sake of the Iraqis and those who have died in the war. Otherwise, it will take far more creative men than Washington D.C. has to come up with a reason they paid the ultimate price.
So, America, while President Bush and his administration are certainly to blame for choosing war as the best course of action and playing fast and loose with the facts, it's your tacit approval that made it all the easier to get into this mess. If your approval rating of Bush has fallen, your self esteem should plummet by the same amount.
A suggestion: Read a newspaper for an hour a night in leiu of watching "American Idol" or the Christian Broadcast Network. You just may learn something that saves someone's life down the line. And then we may be able to see the average American as someone more than a child led by the nose by a cynical P.R. machine in D.C.
