Spin

You've got to hand it to our military, they sure make good war! The world has spun round to see the dawning of a new day. Final victory has been won; Freedom in Iraq has been achieved!

Whoo-hoo, I think that's the reaction the Administration requires. The pundits (arch conservatives all) have taken great delight in this, working themselves into an I-told-you-so-lather, pointing to ample footage of jubilant Iraqis celebrating and telling anyone remotely critical of Resident Bush's war how wrong they were. Okay, I will admit that I'm happy Saddam Hussein is out of power. I'll also admit that while the war was bad, it could have been LOTS worse. I've even removed my "War Is Not The Answer" bumper sticker because it's all a moot point now, the war is over. At least the armies-shooting-at-each-other part, and that's where the pundits' vision conveniently halts. You see, our Cowboy-In-Chief has just begun to ride this bucking Arabian and years of unintended consequences are only now beginning. The pundits can call this victory "final" all they want, but anyone who thinks the hard part is finished in Iraq is fooling themselves.

First of all, we are conquerors, not liberators. Liberators have a connection to those they liberate. We don't have any ties with Iraq, by ethnicity, religion, or geography. Okay, geographically we do live on the same planet, but you need something stronger than that. Economic ties through oil just don't cut it. How the heck did we get here anyway? Remember when Bush said back in the 2000 election campaign that he never wanted America to be the world's policeman? Hey Dubya, police duty is exactly what's required over there now.

But who cares? Iraq has Freedom now! Total Freaking Freedom! Freedom so total that it's, um, ANARCHY! All the elation over taking out Saddam didn't even last 48 hours. The first thing the good people of Iraq did when all Hussein's policemen left town was to loot everything they could. Gee, it's just like Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show last month, "the Iraqi people are just like us after all!"

Did you see Donald Rumsfeld's press conference the second or third day of looting when he informed the press that everything was just fine over there? He actually claimed the media created the wrong impression by showing the same clip of a couple huge vases being driven away over and over. What, footage of them gutting museums, hospitals, hotels and banks not good enough for you, Rummy? This guy has sold America so much shit that he thinks he can spin anything now.

Even if Rumsfeld won't admit it, Iraq desperately needs police work and a whole lot of construction. And what are we going to construct? DEMOCRACY! All the trappings of democracy, like elections. As long as they aren't electing any Shiite clerics, of course. They've already mimicked us by having a fake election. Yep, a new mayor of Baghdad, Mohsen al-Zubaidi, showed up one day, supposedly elected by the citizens. Except no one knows who voted, when they voted or how they voted. Jon Stewart is getting more prophetic every day; they are really just like us. And after the American-style elections they must allow democratic McDonalds franchises, then put in democratic American satellite TV in every home, and two matching democratic SUVs in the garage. Oh and most Iraqis will need garages too. And let's make sure they all stock plenty of beer in the fridge, so they'll get too lazy to vote democratically. And of course the new government should let in democratic American missionaries to convert all them heathens into upstanding, democratic Christians. Sorry, REPUBLICAN Christians. I almost forgot, all Democrats are Godless, aren't they? At least that's what the Christian Right says. Gee, what a wonderful new capitalist society we'll build! Not only will we get oil revenues from them, but liquor sales, construction contracts AND charitable donations in return for all our hard work conquering Hussein for them!

Actually, we do share a religion, we all worship MONEY. And if the Bushies are serious when they say the oil belongs to the Iraqi people, they should set up sharing of the oil revenue like they have in Alaska. Everyone gets about $1500 every year there. Can you imagine how far that would go in Iraq? Strangely, in all the reconstruction talk that's been going on, no one has said anything about who gets to pump all that oil. The biggest contract of all and our Resident is completely silent on it. Now that's pretty impolite, after all we paid for this war. Downright crude of him!

Yep, Dubya and Dick made damn sure all the oil fields are safely guarded in New Iraq, for the good of the people of course. Screw the palaces, the shops and the government offices full of computers that might contain information about things like, um... Damn, what was it that we were fighting this war over again? Oh yeah, weapons of mass destruction! You know, like that one that creates a massive just-short-of-atomic air burst that kills everybody within a mile or so. What did they call it, the MOAB? Wait, I remember now, that one's OUR bomb. Shock and awe, after all, is a synonym for terror. All armies are in the business of creating terror, they just call it other names. More spin.

Seriously, I would fear to cross America when we field such an efficient fight machine as this. For awhile there it looked like it would take a long time to conquer Iraq, but then suddenly resistance collapsed, just like in Afghanistan. Hmm, why didn't that ever happen in Vietnam? Maybe thirty years of precision weapons development could let us finally win there too! But we'll have to invent a better reason to attack than weapons of mass destruction this time. Maybe we'll say they're allies with Red China! Sadly some folks might still buy that, but actually neither place is that Communistically Red anymore, it's a kind of Capitalist Red. Maybe we could say it's because they haven't returned every last metacarpal of our missing airmen, or that they have a bunch of 60 year old POWs still rotting away in a bamboo dungeon somewhere. I betcha there are some Bushies who think they could sell that to America, but no, that won't work either. Makes about as much sense as the stuff the Administration is spewing about Syria!

I'm amazed how quickly they started spinning support for a new military crusade! It may easily be valid to say that Syria has let a few Baath Party criminals slip out of Iraq (and a few Islamic radicals slip in) either by design or because of simple lack of enough border guards, but this weapons of mass destruction stuff they're saying! It seems kind of silly to use that reasoning again. Next Dubya will be saying we should attack because Syrians bought up all the ancient artifacts the Iraqis looted from their museums, or something equally plausible to his flag-waving, know-nothing supporters.

Actually I really do hope the military can set up a stable government over there, that soon all Iraqis can enjoy the sweet benefits of a God-fearing democracy. OOPS! Sorry, an Allah-fearing theocracy seems to be what they're asking for this week. Dubya hasn't gotten a spin on that one yet; he's already off mumbling lines about more tax cuts and job creation, but he'll find that Iraq will be a lot harder for Americans to forget than Afghanistan.

There sure isn't any tradition of democracy to build on in Iraq. In fact we already took out a democratically elected government in that part of the world fifty years ago, and replaced it with a monarchy! Anyone remember their Iranian history? At the height of the cold war we (the CIA) overthrew a democratically elected leader in Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, who dared to try to nationalize Iran's oil. We installed Shah Reza Pahlavi in his place and their oil flowed freely for a long time. The Shah was in power about 25 years but, like Saddam, he was a little too heavy handed with his secret police. In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution overthrew him, and we've been in fear of Islamic fundamentalism ever since. Looking back, even with all the Iranian oil nationalized, wouldn't it have been simpler to just pay a buck or two more for a barrel of it? Maybe we would have been inspired to build hybrid cars a lot sooner.

Now, given the political vacuum in Iraq, the Shiites of Iran have a good chance of taking over there too. Gee, if Shiites set up a new Islamic theocracy in Baghdad, do you think they will chop off the hands of all the people who looted last month? Are we going to have to overthrow a fanatic Iraqi Taliban in five years? Okay, maybe that's a little hypothetical, but who can say which way this Arabian bronco is going to buck? We might have to stay in the saddle a LONG time because it will be too dangerous to get off. Hang on tight, George!

And oh George, while you're getting tossed about, I have a much timelier question. WHERE ARE THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION? The search for them has been almost comical. First our troops found some sort of possible underground chemical weapons factory on the second or third day of the war, but that didn't pan out. Then they said they found bio-chemical protection suits and gas masks among captured Iraqi equipment and claimed that was proof WMDs were about. Hey guys, I bet you'd find gas masks in the National Guard Armory of Luxemburg, too! Then they found a couple dozen barrels of pesticide. Close, but contraband DDT doesn't violate the Geneva convention either, dudes. And in the best of all spins, now the Bushies are trying to get the UN to certify there are NO WMDs in Iraq so that they can re-start the UN's oil-for-food program!

You've got to laugh. That's actually a double-edged boondoggle there. It's the pinnacle of irony that the Bushies should now argue there were no WMDs, but the only reason they're saying that is because the bureaucracy of the UN is holding them to the resolution they passed last fall. 1441, the one the Bushies demanded in the first place. What goes around comes around, guys. Practically speaking though, the UN should let them sell oil because the potential for famine is running pretty damn high right now. And would someone PLEASE get the freaking water turned on in Baghdad? How can anyone expect a whole city go without running water for weeks? Children are still dying there.

I guess it's time to ask again The Big Question. The one I kept asking about our war in Afghanistan; the one the mainstream media isn't willing to voice about Iraq: HOW MANY INNOCENT CIVILIANS DIED? And before you say "not many," remind yourself of all the descriptions of Iraqi hospitals that have been aired. Have you ever heard their hospitals described as anything other than FULL OF WOUNDED PEOPLE? Even the ones that have been looted for their equipment and medicine are always described as full of suffering civilians. We killed a LOT of Iraqis and the dying continues.

And another question: Where is Hussein? How come not even one of his sons has been found dead or alive? We're really good at precision bombing but just like Osama in Afghanistan, the prime target may have gotten away. But no! This week the Bushies were trying to spin that Saddam was really dead. They claimed a CIA double agent saw he was killed in that first attack! Or that they moved his wounded body out after the attack. Or maybe it was a double. No, the double was the one who did the video the night of the attack. Or was that pre-recorded? Gee, maybe it's the same agent that claimed they had nukes and sarin gas and anthrax and smallpox and... let's face it, they're trying hard to spin things but the quality of the spooks' intelligence hasn't been very good lately.

It's all how you look at it. Paul Krassner says that everybody is a spin doctor. Spinning the facts to your advantage is a natural thing to do, ask any salesman. Ultimately, belief is all up to you. Invest your belief wisely; don't take anything at face value, because these guys spin EVERYTHING.

That reminds me, I'd better get the philosophy part of the column out of the way. I was thinking to rant again about how decent Christians let themselves be lead into this Administration's bloody schemes, but I'd rather do something different. "Why is there spin?" is as good a topic as any.

Spin is one of the basic cosmic questions that's always puzzled me. It's a zen koan in a way. I don't know if there's any meaningful answer that physics can give to the question of "why does matter like to rotate?"

There's no straight lines in nature except for an axis of rotation. (Even light doesn't travel in perfectly straight lines, it can be bent by gravity.) It seems to be a constant in matter to have an axis and some sort of spin, but why should a gravity source "polarize" itself to begin rotating in the first place? To pick a direction and a straight line to rotate around? There is no up and down in space. What gives the mass one orientation over another?

It's said that electrons rotate around the nuclei of atoms, but do they really? It's such an incredibly fast vibration, how can we really know at that level? And what is so special about gravity that when two things are attracted in space but have too much relative velocity they don't combine, they circle each other. And they never seem to orbit over the poles, they always fall into an orbit that's more or less at the equator. It's never exact circles too, instead it's various ellipses. Everything behaves this way. The galaxy looks more like a pancake instead of a ball because all the individual stars want to rotate around the equator. There's something basic about that behavior; kind of like the speed of light, it's a universal constant. What goes around comes around.

I don't know exactly why I'm fascinated by spin but it kind of reminds me how the Bushies want the whole world to rotate around their wishes. Then they spin their words, promoting their wishes as if they were America's Wishes. We humans talk about an absolute truth, but instead of merging with it directly we sort of orbit it. A shame. Truth cannot be expressed without a viewpoint, there is nothing that's completely objective. Truth is relative and can be spun. There's always a bit of truth in Dubya's words forming the axis of his rhetoric, but then he loads up one side with self-serving lies. Even though it's out of balance and wobbling terribly, as long as he keeps it spinning, he thinks we'll never catch on.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was a danger, and I always knew our army would win, but just because we won the war in four weeks does not mean this war was the right thing to do. What have we won in this war? I think we haven't won anything except a host of new problems. If you really think this invasion was a huge success right now, talk to me again in six months. I really hope you can tell me with a straight face that it still was a good idea to conquer Iraq.

I am NOT saying US out of Iraq. We are on this spinning, jumping, bucking bronco now and we need to make the best of it. I'd love to think there's a rosy future for them and us with a stable and secular Iraqi regime, but instead I think Bush has put us in a terrible position where no spinning deception can help. No tax cut misdirection will help either. Today's deeds, like the overthrow of Mossadegh five decades ago, may come spinning back to us like a whirlwind.

I think I am going to donate some cash to the Red Cross and Red Crescent to help alleviate the suffering we've caused in some small way. Might even donate a healthy percentage of what Bush rebated on our taxes, but first I think I have to go back to the Closet and lie down. The whole world is spinning and I'm whoo-hoo woozy. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

(C) 2003 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: What Rusty really meant to say was that as long as we stay the course and have faith in our beloved leaders, and keep drinking large amounts of beer while watching mindless television programs day in and day out, everything will be A-OK. Sometimes you have to read between the lines with Rusty, you know what I'm saying? Everything will be A-OK if we just believe our leaders. That's all he meant. The Editors and Publisher of Cosmik Debris would like to take this opportunity to wave some flags. We're waving them. Boy, we feel American. We're just going to do this a while. You can go read something else now. Thank you.