REASON TO BE SCARED

It's Halloween time again and boy do we have a scary month ahead of us this year! The stock market is setting record lows almost daily, just begging for a serious crash. A longshoremen lockout is threatening to grinch up our Christmas shopping by keeping our kids' trinkets on the boats and off the shelves, and oh yes, our dear Resident thinks that the cure for all our ills is to kill a whole lot of Iraqis. Or at least build a lot of weapons and threaten to do that. And because he's so freaking eloquent with his reasons for invading, Congress is about to sign away their Constitutional duty to keep an eye on the Executive Branch, giving him a nice blank war resolution. George will be able do whatever the hell he wants in Iraq. Accent on the "hell."

Yep, pretty scary stuff.

Last year it was Old Osama scaring us. What? Did you say Osama WHO? Oh, c'mon, it's not Osama Taniguichi, the neighbor's gardener I'm talking about! You know, Osama BIN LADEN! Tall, bearded Saudi? Wears a turban and camelflauge khakis? Not camouflage, CAMEL-flauge. No, not... oh forget it! No one talks about that guy anymore. No one in the government at least. I wonder what's become of him?

For a year now everyone's taken as incontestable fact that Bin Laden masterminded 911, but I'm still waiting to see all the secret evidence that the government claims links him to it. All we ever got was hearsay and one fuzzy videotape in Arabic. Maybe you think that was proof enough, but what did we REALLY see and hear? For all we know Osama could have been talking about recipes for barbecued goat on that tape. We just read the English subtitles and you know who translated for us. The Bushies. We were programmed what to think. Now don't get me wrong, he's probably the guy, but I'm just being a good skeptic and not trusting the government to tell us the whole truth. For example, in passing last month I saw a news promo where they were showing "captured Al Qaeda documents" to Diane Sawyer or some telegenic blonde "reporter" like her. The documents were papers in three ring binders that looked just like the ones I captured for my kids before they started school a few weeks ago. And since everyone here knows how to read Arabian squiggles I'm sure that we all were able to take in all that evidence in the few seconds it was on screen. More programming. In a similar way I don't quite trust the new revelations about Iraq that are supposedly coming to us by interrogating fighters captured in Afghanistan - revelations that Saddam Hussein has been happily training them for years. I guess one of the scariest things this month is how everyone buys this stuff at face value.

Why are they suddenly trotting out these Iraqi links to Al Qaeda? They've had those guys in jail for almost a year, do George's boys expect us to believe they're JUST NOW asking those Al Q guys if they know Saddam or have been to terrorist school in Iraq? They would have been shouting this from the rooftops months ago if they had really uncovered anything like that. And this past week the Resident's men started moaning about how the Iraqis have been firing on our aircraft. To be sure, they've taken pot shots at them for years in the no-fly zone, but again, why the upswing NOW? And why aren't the Iraqis thankful to us that they have zones without flies in their country? (You're free to take your own pot-shot at me for that. Thank you!) Anyway, could it be that our planes are deliberately violating Iraqi airspace to PROVOKE them into firing? Maybe the Bushies are hoping for an incident where we have to go rescue a pilot or two. Golly, we'd have to send in Special Forces to rescue them from Baghdad, wouldn't we? Oh and while you guys are there, would you mind toppling a certain dictator before you start back home? And by the way, my friend Kevin wants to come with you for the ride.

Kevin is our 14-year-old neighbor. He wants to join Delta Force someday and he thinks it would be great to use an assassination team to take out Hussein. He thinks covert action will solve the drug war too. I think he's seen too many movies. Hollywood's constantly praising the man who ignores the rules and takes matters into his own hands, consequences be damned. Can you imagine how many civil damage suits there'd be if the average Schwarzenegger vehicle happened in real life? Arnold'd be locked away for 300 years just on the speeding tickets and weapons violations alone! That's supposed to be how a real man solves problems?

Anyway, all this talk of Iraq training terrorists and shooting at our planes sounds like Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to me. (Am I dating myself?) At that time Vietnam was already hip deep in American advisors, thanks to Kennedy and Eisenhower, but LBJ was looking for a way to bring more force to bear on the Communists. In August he had a US destroyer, the Maddox, steam in extra close to North Vietnam's shore. A couple of their torpedo boats came out to meet the Maddox, which returned fire. No American was hurt, but in the tradition of Remember The Maine, the incident was enough for Johnson to convince Congress that we had been cowardly attacked. (Attacking a 300 foot destroyer with a 40 foot PT boat is cowardly?) The Congress then passed the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution. It was not a declaration of war, but we spent the next ten years fighting the non-war known as Vietnam.

Many historians think the Maddox was ordered to go inside the North's territorial waters and provoke an attack. It's known that South Vietnamese commandos were operating in the area, so I'd say the Northern guys felt pretty trigger happy when the Maddox got too close. There was a second incident a couple nights later that LBJ made much of too, but it was later shown that no PT boats tried to attack us that time. Fog of war, who knows what exactly happened? Bottom line, the whole thing was just what Johnson needed to goad Congress into giving him the green light for sending in regular American troops. Made him look real strong against Goldwater that year too. That's right, all that came down just three months before the '64 Presidential Election. Sound familiar?

Bush has been banging the drum of war against Iraq all year and even without a Maddox-like incident he almost has his own personalized do-it-yourself war resolution from Congress. Never mind that Congress is the Branch with the sole power to declare war. Never mind that George swore an oath on the Bible to defend the Constitution.

Sorry, "A" Bible. There are so many different versions of it, there is no "THE" Bible. And what's so special about swearing on a Bible anyway? (By the way, this is this month's mandatory philosophy paragraph, folks. You can take a bathroom break if you want.) That's a really wide separation of Church and State when every courtroom forces witnesses to swear upon a Bible. That's some protection against falsehood too! Recently Buzz Aldrin hit a guy who was trying to force him to swear on a Bible that he walked on the Moon. The guy's name was Bart Sibrel - doesn't he have something better to do? I believe the astronauts did get up there, but so what if they didn't? It wouldn't be the first time that the government has lied to us and spent the money on something else. At least we have Teflon, Tang, Velcro and better computers from the space program; the money wasn't completely wasted. So Sibrel doesn't have anything better to do than to harass a former astronaut and get punched for his trouble, big deal. But then Buzz never actually swore about the truth of the matter, did he? Hmm. What's the real reason Aldrin's not willing to swear on a Bible? Maybe Sibrel is right and Aldrin's fearful of some supernatural consequence if he lies with hand on a Bible, like getting burns or boils or something. Or is he just Bible-phobic? Everyone knows all those witnesses are telling the Truth in our courts because they swore on a Bible! Likewise we KNOW Dubya's going to uphold the Constitution because he swore it on the Bible. Sorry, A Bible.

Everybody back from break? Mark my words... No! Mark our dear Resident's words over the next few weeks. It's a different gulf but I expect an LBJ-like cry of wolf any day now. If only we could have his hand on a Bible all the time!

[Dubya and Blair]

I sure hope Dubya knows what he's doing, but every speech he gives is becoming more shrill than the last. Somehow I can't think that the official version - that "weapons of mass destruction" stuff - is really what this is all about. Tony Blair says he knows how dangerous Hussein is. C'mon, does Dubya have to depend the Prime Minister of England for proof of Hussein's malevolence? Just imagine some Pierce Brosnan-type in a tux nosing around Baghdad for the evidence. Yeah sure, the Brits are the Saddam Experts! And I'm sure the timing of this war fever has nothing to do with the upcoming Congressional elections! The Bushies'd love to re-take Congress by shouting down someone who's thinking twice about the wisdom of this war. Another possibility is that Bush wants a war economy. A constant threat requires a lot of guns and planes to guard our nation with and that means big money for his buddies. And then there's the personal motive, revenge. Saddam did try to take out his Dad once, or so they tell us.

It's scary enough that no one knows the real reason why Bush has become so fixated on a war with Iraq, but even scarier is the fact that no one knows how he plans to wage this war. Is this supposed to be a surgical strike, or a massive surprise attack? If he follows the usual pattern we're going to bomb the snot out of Iraq again, then send in a huge invasion force that isn't even in the Mid-East yet. Sure, the Iraqis won't know it's coming! I get the impression he expects all the Republican Guard to surrender without a shot, and all the oppressed Iraqis to welcome us with open arms saying "where have you been the last 12 years?"

Let's hypothesize for a minute that Saddam Hussein really does have one little atomic bomb. One that he bought at a Russian garage sale. Normally an atomic bomb is used for deterrence. It makes the land useless with radioactive pollution so you never actually explode it, you only threaten to. So in light of that, what's the one situation that might make him use his bomb? When he's desperate; when he feels he's doomed. Think he'd get desperate around the time all the American forces are bunched up in one spot, either hitting the beach at Basra or poised on the southern border of Iraq? Now that's what's really scary this October.

Ah, October. I bet Dubya's going out on Halloween dressed as the new Sheriff in town with pearl-handled six-guns and a big white Stetson. Actually who needs Halloween? That's probably how he really thinks of himself, the good guy on the white horse, ready to rid the town of evildoers. Well, sorry George. This isn't a John Wayne or Gene Autry flick; it's probably going to be a lot more like Black Hawk Down. How many people have to die to correct your dad's botch job back in 1991, Dubya? That's what this is all about isn't it? A tidy little war to restore your dad's rep.

You know, I make it a 90% chance that Saddam Hussein will come out of this smelling like a... hmm, I was about to say a rose, but there's no chance of that is there? He will come out of this still smelling like a turd, still managing to stink up everyone's lives, the same way he has for years. That's pretty scary too.

Anyway I have to get ready for the trick-or-treaters. Kevin tells me the Special Forces Camelflage will be big this year so I'll have to change some of our decorations from the traditional monster décor. I guess it's time go back into the Closet and see what I've got to work with. I hope I'm not too scared to come out again. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: The publisher and editors of Cosmik Debris Magazine would like it to be known right here and now that they have no knowledge of any plan to "bomb the snot" out of the Iraqis, and if they did they would certainly keep it secret. The only plan they are aware of, according to some of the editors, involve shelling the teeth out of some street vendors, though there was a rumor about bayoneting the kneecap off a Saudi. Since this was being spread by the office gossip we've chosen to disregard it.