Same Speech, Same Strategy

Ellie was the wise one, Bush, as usual. She opted out, busying herself with office chores, sweeping up the accumulation of eucalyptus leaves out on the balcony... Addicted as I am to the great affairs of the world, I sat like a fool and watched your television speech.

Fine words again, Bush. But to bill the speech as a "non-partisan" address to the nation on the occasion of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is about as deceptively disingenuous as Fox News calling itself fair and balanced. With the elections now a few short weeks away, it was a transparent attempt to persuade the American electorate of your concern for their protection and the success of your "strategy" in the war on terrorism.

I don't buy it, Bush. With Bin Laden still at large and cocking the occasional snook in your direction, with continuing terrorist attacks throughout the world, with Afghanistan descending rapidly into renewed warfare and bloodshed, with apparently ungovernable Iraq still tottering on the edge of civil war, I don't see how you can see there and boast about the success of your strategy. It seems to me that it has been proven time and again to be dangerously misguided and incompetently enacted.

My hope is that it won't wash again this time, that we are sufficiently wised-up, as a nation, to listen to your words with greater skepticism. One more rhetorical appeal to support your "staying the course" and to "give you the tools you need" to win this "defining conflict of the twenty-first century" sounds too much like the rest of them, and each time the hole you dig for yourself, for America, and for the world gets deeper. It's time, as the Democrats have taken to saying, for a "new direction."

You talk about the hated "extremists" as the source of all instability in the world, and promise to exterminate those few in order to protect us. My view is different. I believe you do them too much honor in declaring war on them. They are, after all, "extremists"--out on the far edge of global reality. A far greater threat to international stability, as I see it, is the huge, growing mass of human beings who are suffering, neglected, jobless and purposeless, starving, disease-ridden, and in constant struggle for survival on this already overcrowded earth. A far greater threat is the exploitation of the planet's resources to the point of depletion. A far greater threat is the environmental damage we are causing, as a species, which respected scientists keep warning us may soon be irreversible.

These are the "defining conflicts of the twenty-first century," Bush. The terrorists are simply those who are finding them fertile ground for their own agendas and distorted values. Your speech, in my view, proceeds not from a great vision for the future of the world, but from a short-sighted obsession with one relatively small manifestation of much larger problems. Of course we need to do everything we can to rout out the ruthless criminal elements in our midst. That goes without saying. But you, I believe, are in danger of mistaking the symptoms for the cause. We should be examining and treating the root causes for the grave, global injustices which are the breeding ground for those extremists that you talk about, not simply applying band-aids to the resultant symptoms.

The fact that we don't seem to be winning this war of yours, on any front, is surely of significance. These wars are unwinnable, so long as their causes go unaddressed, because there will always be more extremists ready to take arms against perceived injustices. You're at the wrong end of this sick horse, Bush. Your grand speeches notwithstanding, the stench continues to spread.