Bay of Pigs Redux: Unilateralization Strategery

By: SnoopDopeyDogg

JFK showed sheer genius by allowing right wing Cubans to put their money where their mouths were. In 1961, he landed about 1500 of them on various beaches in Cuba where they subsequently creamed, futilely waiting for the U.S. Air Force to win the war for them. Like most wingnuts, they proved much more effective at agitation than action. If you think that something is worth fighting and dying for, then YOU should be allowed, in fact forced, to do so. Many of today's hawks are the same ones who fiercely advocated the military involvement of others in Viet Nam from the safety of their sofas. It is certainly not unpatriotic to refuse to participate in an unjust war; in fact, the trials at Nuremberg held that our moral duty to our fellow man is greater than our duty to blindly follow orders. It is simply hypocrisy elevated to criminal levels to advocate war while ducking the risk yourself, as many of today's "chickenhawks" have done. Similarly, those who are clamoring to send someone else's sons and daughters to Iraq should be allowed to prove the sincerity of their convictions: by being air-dropped over Baghdad or leading the charge from the lead tank instead of from in front of a big-screen TV or hunkered down in a secret bunker. Put Big Dick Cheney and his apologists on the front lines, and, by sheer coincidence, we will have world peace. We could call the latest version of the Bay of Pigs invasion: "Big Oil Over Baghdad"

It is NOT that Saddam is a great guy! To the contrary, he has provided the world with ample evidence that he is a criminal. It's that the efforts to invade Iraq are based on OIL, profits for Big Oil, that is, and NOT terrorism. There is anywhere from ZERO to NO evidence that Iraq had anything to do with ANY of the terrorist incidents against the U.S. in the last decade. In fact, the CIA trained and backed Osama bin Laden was one of many Islamic fundamentalists that targeted Saddam, since Saddam is a secular dictator, not the Islamic despot envisioned by Osama.

Cheney claims that Saddam has "amassed weapons of mass destruction", or is on the verge of doing so, directly contradicting weapons inspectors who, unlike Dick, where actually there. Fine. Then Cheney should have no difficulty in showing the American people and the rest of an interested world the evidence that has him so convinced of their existence or Saddam's evil plans for their imminent production. He can do so without divulging his sources. Just as Cheny has refused to show us the "weapons of mass deception" from Enron and Halliburton, he now refuses to show us the weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. We are supposed to trust him. We should trust him with the same dignity, honor, and deference that Cheney and the right wing cabal showed President Clinton. Germans trusted Hitler when he claimed that he was invading Poland in response to Polish terrorism. At that time, Hitler had only established that he was a right wing autocrat, not the genocidal war criminal that we now know him to be. History has proven repeatedly that anyone taking politicians solely at their word is an idiot. Who needs a constitutional separation of powers when in Big Oil CEO's We Trust (like Bush/Cheney, etc.)? Instead of bribing politicians and accounting firms, why don't oil co's., like Cheney's Halliburton, raise a private army and go and take Saddam's oil away from him themselves? Conservatives are always telling us how the private sector is superior to "Big Government". Here is yet another golden opportunity for them to put their money, instead of ours, where their mouths are. Why should decent Americans have to fight and die because the greedy are too cowardly to fight for their largesse? Why should taxpayers have to subsidize their greed-grab? Big Oil is getting the lion-share of the loot, so they should absorb a similar amount of the risk. Iraq's oil is already on the market. Much more would be if not for sanctions.

The Bush Regime's assertion that we must act now in order to prevent a possible strike from Saddam flies in the face of logic, and counter to the strategy with which we fought the Cold War: Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) We held the threat of retaliation over Russia's head in order to prevent their use of "weapons of mass destruction", knowing full well that our use of such weapons against Russia would guarantee a response by the Soviets. Similarly, it is his knowledge of a unified military response against Iraq, proven after his invasion of Kuwait, which is keeping Saddam from using "weapons of mass destruction", and attacking him would only guarantee his use of them, or prove that Cheney is lying about their existence or the seriousness of their threat. SAD (Saddam's Assured Destruction) has, and will, work as well as its proven strategic predecessor MAD.

Strangely, those vanguards of patriotism that chided President Clinton for launching cruise missiles as a supposed attempt to divert voters' attention away from his domestic problems, are silent regarding the possibility that Cheney is doing the same thing on a much larger scale. Why is an invasion of Iraq so expedient now? By sheer coincidence, of course, the midterm elections are just weeks away and Saddam has done nothing different within the last few weeks that he has, or hasn't, been doing over the last several years. Cheney, like his loyal disciple, Bush II, has hit the "trifecta", as Bush so eloquently put it, with a possible invasion of Iraq: He has the opportunity to grab 10% of the world's oil supply for the suits that bought the election for him and reward their efforts and guarantee their continuing support with the lesser known but equally important strategy known as MAPE (Mutually Assured Portfolio Enhancement); he can divert attention away from his possible corporate crimes at Halliburton, and those of others in the Bush administration, including Bush, not to mention the hordes of his rapacious conservative peers who have been implicated or the token few actually indicted in the recent epidemic of corporate crime exposure; and, he can influence the midterm elections and hope that he can sucker enough flag-waving lemmings into electing Republicans that will further the right wing goal of rule by corporation.

If the Bush regime is going to make it a new foreign policy to start taking out "evil" regimes, then Saddam is probably as good a place to start as any. Unfortunately, that is apparently only a pretext. They can evidence that removing a despotic dictator and making the world a safer place IS their motive, instead of acting as Big Oil's agents in a greed-grab for Iraq's 10% share of the world's oil supply, by: a) providing evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and b) making sure that Iraqi oil remains in Iraqi hands after Saddam is removed, and NOT in the hands of Big Oil. Our goal should then be to make sure that Iraq's oil is accessible via the world market, and not just an enrichment scheme for Big Oil, for as we have seen in the past, corporate enrichment is not always what is best for our country.