Lately, I've been in quite a few conversations with friends and peers that end up concluding that because we have not yet found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration are a bunch of liars and should be removed from power. I agree that these Bush guys are unfit as national leaders. I would like to see them gone. But increasingly, I find the ongoing, single-minded public conversation about Saddam's WMD to be a distraction from more important issues.

The problem is that this conversation over whether or not Saddam had WMD's keeps us locked into the Bush administration's terms which, as we now know, were false from the very beginning. We know that the war in Iraq was not really about Saddam's WMD. So, let's stop talking about Saddam's WMDs and start talking about the issues that WMD's were designed to distract us from in the first place.

Instead of staying locked in on these false premises about why we are in Iraq, I'd like to see an honest, straightforward public conversation about the most core, fundamental reason why we are in Iraq. The reason is simple, obvious, and in all of our faces all day long. The public conversation we need to have right now is simply this:

If we want to continue to live the American way of life, as it is currently conceived and organized, then we need to have a very big, very heavily armed military presence alongside the source of the world's largest remaining concentrated source of cheap, abundant energy, the oil reserves of the Arabian peninsula.

Remember, Osama's original beef was with the Saudi family. The Islamic fundamentalists have made clear who they are going after. To figure out why we're in Iraq, the U.S. media can wait 50 years for Dick Cheney's energy taskforce notes to come out. Or we can look at the clear evidence indicating that our military presence in the Middle East is necessary if we want to maintain the vast, steady flow of inexpensive oil that our American Way of Life so thoroughly depend upon.

Our national leaders need to make these choices more clear to the American people rather than continuing to pretend that we can motor, sprawl and "grow" endlessly, at no cost. If our national leaders aren't going to make these choices clear, then our national media needs press them and raise awareness in the American collective consciousness: If we want to keep living this way, then here are the costs. Blood for oil is the deal.

The Saddam-WMD discussion is taking up way too much media space. It doesn't really move anything forward except, perhaps, to de-legitimize the Bush presidency. I do find a certain pleasure in seeing this administration de-legitimized. But even if the second president in a row is successfully torn to shreds and a new guy comes to office, what are we left with? The American public still hasn't been leveled with or prepared for the necessary changes ahead. And the American presidency and system of governance is left ever more tattered in the eyes of the world than it already is.

Who does it serve, the U.S. media's endless, single-minded political story-line of Did He or Didn't He (get a blow job, do enough to stop 9/11, have the WMD's, take his Hollywood actress wife to the sex club...)?

Who does it serve?


11:03 AM | Link |