Aug. 21, 2006
 
MANN TALK: The Bottom Line
 
By Perry Mann
 
Hinton, WV (HNN) – “BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)---Under a scorching sun, Baghdad taxi driver Sameer Abdul Razzaq wraps a wet towel around his head and waits for gasoline in a line stretching a mile. ‘I’ve been here since 6 a.m.,’ he said Sunday. ‘If I’m lucky, I’ll get to the end of the line by sunset. I actually think I might end up spending the night here.’
 
“This is the capital of what should be one of the world’s great oil producers, but corruption and insurgent attacks have Iraqis mired in their worst fuel shortage since Saddam Hussein was ousted, with black market gasoline costing as much as $4 a gallon.” (As I write I read that the black market cost is $4.92 and the official price is $0.64.)
 
This article is accompanied by a photograph showing in the foreground four family members sleeping on the roof of their automobile, waiting in a queue outside a gas station; and in the background there are vehicles of every description and size extending to the horizon, whose occupants are waiting to pay the official price, probably because they can’t pay the black market price.
 
It’s not that Iraq doesn’t have the wherewithal to have cheap gas. It sits atop the world’s third-largest proven petroleum reserves, which are estimated to be 115 billion barrels. Only Saudi Arabia and Iran have more proven reserves. The Bush and neocons assured America that the war in Iraq would be paid for from the sale of Iraqi oil. Now we learn that not only is the oil not paying for the war but there is not even enough to power the autos of the Iraqi at $4.92 a gallon. What more can be said to confirm the failure of Bush’s misadventure? It’s the bottom line and it speaks failure and augurs disaster.
 
The failure and disaster are the result of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld’s decision that for America the bridge into the 21st Century was to build a democracy in the midst of the Muslim world. So they decided in backrooms that Iraq was an apple ready to fall and that all this nation had to do was shake the tree and---voila--- the apple would fall into the basket of the U.S.A. Then America could build right in the middle of the world of Arabs, and their oil, a democracy and a market economy, which would serve as a buffer to protect Israel and would be the gasoline station, the mother of gasoline stations, for America and for her allies. Further, the picture of an Iraq democratize and flourishing from a market economy, would encourage the whole of the Middle East to democratize and introduce the system that God ordained: capitalism.
 
But Bush and Cheney and the neocons had a dream that has become a nightmare, hope that has become despair, and a military preemptive action designed to last six weeks that has lasted to date three years and five months and has deteriorated into civil war with no end in sight. While Americans luxuriate in the Green Zone, the land they came to liberate is a killing zone day and night, day in and day out. It was a gamble that failed. The dice rolled snake eyes.
 
Here is a paragraph from an article from The New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg titled “Snake Eyes.” “It is the nature of gambling that the gamble may lose. The dice have been well and truly rolled, and they have come up snake eyes. The war’s sole real gain---the overthrow of the murderous Saddam Hussein regime---is mocked by the chaos and suffering that have overwhelmed millions of Iraqis, whose country is again a republic of fear. The concrete losses are horrific: nearly three thousand American and ‘coalition’ troops killed; thousand more maimed; scores of thousands of Iraqi civilian dead; a third of a trillion dollars burned through. So are the less tangible ones: the unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world and Europe; the self-inflicted loss of America’s moral prestige; the neglect of real nuclear dangers, in Iran and North Korea, while chimeras were chased in Iraq. The neoconservative project of a friendly, democratic Middle East, with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace, is worse than a charred ruin---it is a flaming inferno.”
 
Day after day the report is the shocking same: A few troops of this nation killed and many wounded; fifty or more dead and many more wounded from attacks by Shiites against Sunnis; fifty or more dead and many more wounded from attacks by Sunnis against Shiites. Marines see a woman lustfully and conspire to rape her and cover up the rape by killing her family and everyone else in sight. Sunnis and Shiites seem to have an appetite for killing each other that grows by what it feeds on: the daily slaughter of one another. There is no end and no limits to the horrors of what Bush and his ilk have initiated and do not know how to stop or how to prevail.
 
George was a drunk until he had drunk himself into a hole, the only ladder out of which was religion. So he called on Jesus Christ to help him out of it. Then when asked in a debate with Gore who was his philosophical mentor he replied Jesus Christ. Does Bush have any conception of the vastness of the chasm between Christ’s teachings and his policies and decrees as president of this nation? Of course not. I suspect that this man never had a sleepless night. He has never had to worry about mounting bills; he has never had to worry about how he would get to college and how to pay for it; he has never worried about the low minimum wage that many people live on; and perhaps, he has never had a real worry in his life.
 
And I doubt that he has tossed and turned wide awake at nights over the death and destruction his preemptive war has wrought or over the killing of this nation’s men and women or over the killing of the boys and girls and the babies and mothers and fathers and grandfathers and grandmothers in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. And I doubt that he is aware of the bitter irony resulting from his confession of his Christian faith and his witnessing thereof and his warmongering, his policies favoring the rich over the poor, and his unilateralism.
 
Bush has brought war to the Middle East not democracy. And his war is likely to produce a generation of Muslim insurgents and suicide bombers. His war to defeat terrorism is in fact generating terrorism, producing terrorism, increasing terrorism. The more he wars against it the more there will be to war against. And he has hurt the poor and the middle class of this country and enhanced the wealth and prospect of the already rich. The bottom line in Iraq and in this nation as a result of George Bush’s presidency is chaos in the former and injustice in the latter.