Attacking
Iran: The Defining
Moment Of The Foolish Generation
By Robert Weitzel
07 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In the 2002 run-up to the Iraq
War, President Bush stopped for a photo-op at the East Literature Magnet
School in Nashville, Tennessee. Using the opportunity to justify his
impending invasion of Iraq to middle and high school students, he shared
with them his mangled version of a Texas truism, “Fool me once,
shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled
again."
It seems a majority of us can get fooled again . . . and again . . .
and yet again. In fact, a critical mass of the American electorate is
taken in as easily as a photon of light is sucked down a black hole.
Who would have thought that while the United States is embroiled in
a war and occupation predicated on impeachable lies—that all but
the comatose or Fox News devotees are aware of—a slight majority
of Americans could be duped into supporting a pre-emptive attack on
Iran based on “intelligence” provided by the Bush-Cheney
administration.
But sadly, that’s exactly what we seem prepared to do. According
to a recent Zogby Poll, 52 percent of those interviewed supported a
military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon—which
experts believe will take at least another five years. Time enough for
a diplomatic resolution.
Granted, gullibility is inherent in our species and one can imagine
its survival value in our evolutionary past. But we no longer live in
caves or fight with clubs. Believing everything we hear or read does
not enhance survival when smoking guns can turn into mushroom clouds.
So how is it that we’ve let ourselves become such a Foolish Generation?
Is the root of our foolishness nourished by the fact that 70 percent
of Americans actually believe there is a devil in hell? Given the mega-church
mentality, with its crusader zeal and apocalyptic vision that has hijacked
our generation’s collective conscience and political discourse,
it’s not a large leap of faith to believe that Lucifer can turn
his minions loose in Iraq or Iran or wherever.
And if that faith is cynically exploited by corporate-owned Neocons
bent on the conquest of the oil rich “Land of Evil” in the
name of God and freedom, is our goose-stepping off to war really such
a conundrum?
President Bush raises the specter of World War III should Iran develop
a single nuclear weapon (the U.S. and its allies have thousands), just
as then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice conjured up imagines
of mushroom clouds in the march to war with Iraq.
Our attack on Iran could very possibly unleash WW III, but not for the
reason Bush imagines. Nuclear-armed countries such as China, Russia,
India, Pakistan and Israel, and all non-nuclear Muslim nations are inextricably
bound in a web of strategic, economic and religious interests in the
“Land of Evil” that cannot withstand our foolishness indefinitely.
And the mushroom clouds we’ll see over Iran will not be from jihadist
suicide bombers, but from our tactical bunker-busting nuclear missiles,
which are an integral part of the military’s attack plan.
Lest we get fooled again:
People will die in this new
war in Iran as they are in Iraq, as they did in Vietnam—as people
do in war—by the tens of thousands or millions . . . one irreversible
death at a time.
Families will be vaporized
as they huddle together and cry and fowl themselves in fear and pray
to whichever god they believe is listening. A child will die from a
single bullet to the brain or in pieces. The dead will become carrion
and the dogs and the rats and the crows will grow fat.
And when the bombing stops
and the blood and pieces of flesh and viscera are washed away and down
the sewer, history will have been made and the Foolish Generation will
be indicted.
We will not be able to camouflage
our culpability within the mottled grey of words such as “terrorism”
and “genocide.” We will have committed the murder of innocent
daughters and sons and mothers and fathers on a massive scale. There
can be no mincing of words. It is mass murder. And our foolishness is
no defense.
During his warmongering at
the East Literature Magnet School, President Bush stressed the importance
of youngsters understanding history because it gives them “a better
sense of what it means to be an American.” Imagine youngsters
in Berlin in 1939 listening to a similar speech by their warmongering
Furher. Now imagine their sense of what it meant to be a German in 1945,
tainted as they were by the blood on their parents’ hands. History
has not been kind to those youngsters.
If our Foolish Generation
cannot find a way to extricate itself from the black hole of history
into which it is plunging, our children’s blood-spattered generation
will face the court of world opinion with a weak defense:
“Fool me once, shame
on you. Fool me twice, shame on me . . . and my issue in perpetuity.”
Robert Weitzel
is a freelance writer whose essays appear in The Capital Times in Madison,
WI. He has been published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Skeptic
Magazine, Freethought Today, and on popular liberal websites. He can
be contacted at: [email protected]
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