It looks like the Bush PR effort towards war is working according to
plan. This morning, I heard on the CBS morning show the following
quote from a man on the street deal about the potential for war:
“Well, I guess we need to do this to them, since they came over here
and attacked us.” The conflation of the Iraqi buildup with Al Qaeda
and the WTC attacks is relentless. I find it kind of grotesquely
racist and xenophobic, myself. “We have promised you that we’ll take
down the people responsible for the terrorist attacks. However, we
can’t find them so we’ll find the worst swarthy towel-heads we can,
attack them and call it good. That they have oil we want is gravy on
the deal.” How long is it before the premise that
“they are about to do something terrible, so we’re going to stop them
preemptively” moves from our foreign policy and into the domestic?
“That guy was almost certain to commit a crime, so we locked him up.”
It makes me very nervous, like basically everything that comes out of
this current administration. They keep telling us how we can’t live in
fear, but I’m far more scared of them and what they will do to my
beloved country than I am of any external enemy.