A farce being enacted in the run-up to the US Presidential poll is the way opinion is converging on the war on Iraq. That is the farce of the so-called great American dream, read nation.
Barring Barack Obama, most front-runners for the Republican and Democratic nominee front-runners solidly backing what a certain Texan cowboy fondly refers to as an act to purge an axis of evil.
It was also put across, in a discreet way that it was a war to wipe out terror from the face of earth. Notice the striking similarity of the rhetoric ; War on terror, Iraq War –II.
It was all a scramble for oil. Only, the aggressors had the finger on the trigger and the targets were rag-tag armies which reigned over lawless lands and overwhelmingly innocent civilians.
That was all fine then, but when the scenes turned chaotic and the emotive appeal of Saddam’s hanged torso electrified suicide squads across the Islamic fiefdoms in the Middle East, body bags began to puncture the invincibility of American military might.
In wars the U.S. has fought supposedly to help mankind, they have run into a comic situation without an easy fix. In Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The issue is that they could not digest the fact that the demon of chaos they unleashed on fragile nations – those ruled by iron fist or medieval moorings but without a social ethos – could not be domesticated by mere military might.
And the U.S. is incapable of accepting a bigger picture – that they went wrong as a nation.
Now, only Barack Obama drags the Iraq war, or the initial show of support for it, into the presidential campaign.
Hillary Clinton displays lack of conviction when she proclaims she was convinced about the war but was let down by the Texan cowboy style operations in Iraq.
She should have known that as a Senator, she is at least expected to understand that cow boys can never become statesmen.
Super Tuesday may not have been a verdict on this, but there is definitely some GPS-enabled soul searching through the corridors of its limited history that the American public, its foot soldiers in the Western world, the presidential nominees and Democrats as well as Republicans need to do on its war policy.
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