[Newspoetry] The Shape of Things to Come...

[Donald L Emerick]

Dear fellow newspoetic correspondents:

I have tried to ask myself how war in Iraq will happen sometime in the near future, even though, to date, Blix and company have been unable to find any evidence to support the Bush team's allegations that Iraq possesses programs that aim at producing "weapons of mass destruction".

What will happen is a pre-textual event.

1.  For instance, it might involve something like the pair of mad Arabs who drove onto one of the American military training sites in the Gulf area and murdered American personnel.  Or, it might be happen after some mad Arab tries to bomb some US installation in the region.

Unlike recent cases of such mad acts, though, the last case will be different.  It will be different because our President has placed all of the military resources into this region that he deems necessary to wage war upon Iraq.  It will be different because our Congress has expressly abdicated its own on-delegatable power to declare war by granting the President the authority to initiate war at such times and on such occasions as he shall deem desirable.  It will be different because Bush will not wait, next time, to see whether the alleged provocation is properly something for which Iraq itself is responsible.

2.  Or, another scenario -- possibly to be merged with the above kind of event -- will be some sort of alleged "uprising" in Iraq against the Hussein regime.  A junta leader will appear on global media, allegedly from inside of Iraq, and "appeal" to the family of nations in the world (and, their big brother, the United States) for assistance in the war of liberation.  American forces will then immediately come to the "aid" of this allegedly more humanitarian people's liberation movement.

3.  So, regardless of inspections and regardless of any Iraqi complicity in the alleged provocation, Iraq will be attacked by US military forces in the near future.

Only later will we probably discover that the provocateurs were unrelated causally to any acts of the present Iraqi regime -- or that the uprising was largely a staged affair, possibly not even happening at the place that the media are given to believe that it is.  But, by then, it will be too late to bring back the many Iraqi innocents from their collateral deaths and extensive bodily injuries.  It will be too late to save the Iraqi capital stock of housing, factories, farms, and public works that Bush will have destroyed.

4.  But, from Bush's point of view, the world will have been saved.  Of course, his definition of the world is quite limited to his own narrow self interests, and is not at all the same place that I mean, more universally, when I use the word world.

I do not keep asking myself is whether there is some action that I could take to forestall this impending doom.  I ask what I may do so that this Bush wrong-doing will be appropriately punished someday, like any other criminal act which involves premeditated murder.  If it takes a thousand years to punish such an act, by ostracism, then I am willing to begin that long process now, ostracizing Bush by pointing to his evil and denouncing it as long and loud and often as I can.  And, too, I hope that when my own participation in such denouncing of Bush's evil acts ends, that there will be others to follow on, continuing to denounce such evil.

5.  And, thus, I find it quite cheering to see, every once in awhile, some good done by some person such as the outgoing Governor Ryan of Illinois -- as in his recent decision to excuse from mass execution, from mass murder, so many persons who inhabited death's rows, sometimes unjustly, sometimes wrongly convicted.  By doing this, Ryan joins another saint in my too-sparsely populated pantheon of Illinoisans -- namely, John Peter Altgeld.  The memory of one or two such good persons is enough to inspire me to hope against fate for an age when good persons become the norm of society, and not the rare exception that they have been and are.  And, such is my faith that I believe that the good does represent the shape of things to come and do not utterly despair at the vast evil of the many ages through which man has so far lived.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/newspoetry/attachments/20030112/885a74f5/attachment.html