A Letter To George Bush: Wiretaps and Public Gullibility

Dear Mr. Bush,
So, two thirds of the American public approve of you giving yourself the authority to order wiretaps of anyone you feel like for national security reasons, Mr Bush. What does that say about Americans today that they would trust someone whose administration has repeatedly lied to them about motivations for their most recent incursion in empire-building?

That they are gullible idiots, blind fools, or brainwashed? During Hitler’s reign in Nazi Germany I’m sure you would have found widespread support for his programs of expansion and invasion, and loss of personal liberty in the name of the state security too. Did that make what he did right?

(Hey, what’s that, did he just compare the United States; its people, its leader, and its government to Nazi Germany’s? I don’t know did I? I’ll leave that for you to decide yourself.)

Mr. Bush you have programmed your people to believe they are under constant threat of attack. How many attacks have taken place in the mainland United States since Sept 11th 2001? What proof is there, except the words of your government spokespeople, that there have even been any attempts? Periodically you issue announcements saying you are currently under code yellow alert.

Do you ever say why after the fact, Mr. Bush? Well no, of course not, it’s all a matter of National Security so you can’t tell us anything, except to take you at face value. Would you lie to your people?

Actually, come to think of it, yes you would. To start there were the non-existent weapons of mass destruction as an excuse to invade Iraq, and it’s been downhill from there. Saddam Hussein was a horrible excuse for a human being, there’s no doubt about that, but couldn’t you have just said that right from the beginning and enlisted the aid of the rest of the world to depose him, instead of making up some bullshit story about terrorists and weaponry?

Why did you have to lie about stuff? Why were you in such a damned hurry to invade Iraq anyway? Did you need those oil-fields that badly? Look at the mess you’ve created by invading so quickly and not having any plan for infrastructure after the fact. More of your soldiers have died trying to occupy that country then did in the initial invasion.

Every time you or one of your sycophants say that things have turned a corner for the better, the situation deteriorates. The elections in Iraq were a coup for you, no doubt about that Mr. Bush, they went off wonderfully, and the people of Iraq were excited. I admit I felt a twinge of hope that in spite of everything, maybe it would turn out all right for those poor people.

But you didn’t plan for the divisions in that society being so deep. The country is steps away from a civil war that will make Lebanon seem like a walk in the park. Your armed forces are stuck in a situation where they are screwed no matter what. They are not trained as peacekeepers, and neither side trusts them anymore. One side sees you as the oppressor; the other side sees you as the incompetents who can’t offer them any protection.

Mr. Bush, you’ve just asked Congress to approve a budget in the trillions of dollars, with most of it being eaten up by your Homeland Security and your non-war in Iraq. It’s not a war anymore because you said the war is over, so what you’d call it now I don’t know. An occupation, a police action, I’ve heard those words before even if you don’t remember them being spoken.

While you were drinking with your National Guard buddies during Vietnam that’s what they were calling America’s last military defeat. Of course, this won’t be a military defeat because you won the war, but oh Mr. Bush, you’re losing the peace over there badly.

Why have you made the U.N. the enemy? You’ve convinced half the people in your country that the U.N. is against America because it wouldn’t support your unilateral plan to invade Iraq. Why didn’t it support your plan? Because it was afraid of what would happen if proper preparations weren’t taken. It didn’t want the horror that’s happening now to occur.

What force in the post-World War Two period has had the most experience in sending people into situations and keeping peace? Well since it is the only one to even try it, the U.N. It has won two Nobel Peace prizes for their efforts, the first back during the very first implementation of peacekeeping, the Suez crisis back in the fifties.

In the eighties, the peacekeeping forces started to come under fire for their ineffectualness. Since most of this was being directed at them by the Regan administration, which seriously undermined the U.N.’s effectiveness by defaulting on its dues and demanding that the U.N. support American action unquestioningly, it shouldn’t have been taken seriously.

But that was the first administration that had learned the real lesson of Vietnam and Watergate, how to manipulate the glamour of the office to influence the press and the public. Speak in simple, emotionally charged sound bites, which the press dutifully report verbatim, and it leaves no room for debate.

Rebuttals to the president never make the same splash as the original comment, and can’t compete with lines like: “The Sandanistas could drive up the road into Texas tomorrow and invade our country” The fact that this argument was used to justify funding and arming the “contras” terrorists without being questioned by a majority of the American public says something right there about the power of the Oval Office as a propaganda tool.

It has always surprised me Mr. Bush, how a country that claims to be the birthplace of free speech and individuality can be so easily seduced by the power of a title. The reverence that your office is treated with rivals that of the divine right of Kings, which stated that they ruled through the will of God. Perhaps that’s what you and your adherents believe about you and your office. I don’t know.

For no other reason than you are the President, Mr. Bush, if tomorrow you got up and said, black is white and white is black, your word would be taken as gospel by the majority of your country. That’s no matter how many times it has been proven that you’ve lied in the past, or even just been wrong, it doesn’t seem to matter.

Mr. Bush, you, and by extension your constituents, seem to take it as a personal affront whenever anyone thinks that just because something is in America’s best interests, that doesn’t mean it’s in the best interests of the rest of the world. You refuse to participate in anything that might end up ruling against you, like the World Court, by claiming it’s controlled by anti-American sympathisers.

You’ve convinced the people of your country that everyone is out to get them. They really can’t trust anyone except themselves to do the right thing for America, and what’s right for America is the only thing that matters. Don’t you understand how much that frightens and angers people in other parts of the world?

Mr. Bush, by saying things like that, and acting from that position, you make it come true. Why do you want that sort of world to exist? Why have you geared your whole propaganda machine to convincing your people that they are under continual attack by forces they can’t see, and that only you can protect them from?

Please don’t take this the wrong way Mr. Bush; I don’t hate America or its people. Your country represents some of the finest ideals that have ever resonated throughout human history. The only problem is that none of them seem to be on display anymore. In the name of freedom, democracy, and human rights, you have gradually eroded those very principles in the guise of protection.

Mr. Bush you have cynically used and abused your fellow Americans’ love of country to isolate them from the rest of the world. Anyone who is different, or has a different way of looking at things than you do, is suspect and dangerous. You have thrown up walls around your people and blinded them to the beauty of diversity, all in the name of expediting your agenda.

What confuses me the most is what exactly your agenda is Mr. Bush. Was it to make the United States the most powerful nation in the world so it could make everybody do what it wanted? Was it to completely isolate your country from the rest of the world so you and yours could have the freedom to do what you wanted with it?

I can’t see what it is you’ve been trying to do, what vision you have to carry what used to be the beacon that could illuminate the rest of the world with its values into the 21st century and beyond? Your country is probably the most polarized it has been since the civil war in terms of moral and philosophical divisions. Is that leadership?

It makes me feel very sad to see what has happened to the promise and vitality that have been corrupted to such an extent that Americans are distrusted by so much of the world’s populace. Doesn’t that give you some indication that something, somewhere is not right in paradise?

There’s the old story of the mother watching her son in the marching band commenting on how the whole band is out of step, but her son is keeping perfect time. Do you think it’s at all possible, Mr. Bush that this story could be applied to your America? Give it some thought and get back to me if you have the time.

Yours truly,
gypsyman.