Jeff Koopersmith

The Twenty-Year Itch
An Open Letter To George W. Bush
by Jeff Koopersmith

October 18, 2002

The President had his day.

Strutting, apelike, with his usual arms-held-away-from-his-side pose which never fails to remind me of The Incredible Hulk, George W. Bush mounted the podium.

After the usual pleasantries -- greeting the Cabinet and members of Congress who dared to appear on the podium with him -- Bush gleefully, but mock-somberly, announced the impending and unnecessary deaths of hundreds, perhaps tens of thousands, of Iraqi and American boys and girls -- all without hesitation.

He then launched into a mixture of half-truths, truths, facts, non-facts, lies and what posed as patriotism but smacked of hokum.

The President's first half-truth was that the war resolution he was about to sign symbolized "the united purpose of our nation. "

Of course, not much could be farther from the truth. In fact, only a sliver over half of Americans support a war against Iraq, or any other nation -- especially since the White House has not provided even a scintilla of proof that Saddam Hussein, atrocious though he is, is engaged in much more than looting the Iraqi national treasury.

Most people believe Bush is moving on Iraq merely to establish hegemony, both locking up this large Middle East nation and broadcasting his willingness to do the same to the fiefdoms surrounding Iraq -- for example Saudi Arabia, or any country who might dare to exercise their sovereignty in a way not appetizing to Halliburton Corporation, ARCO, ExxonMobil, or Bush's Texas-raised drinking buddies who won't even think about giving up their SUVs.

Bush went on to lie about the Congress, amusing the world (especially the American people) by saying that his signature on this resolution expresses the "considered judgment of the Congress" when he knows that the only reason the Congress voted to approve this nasty piece of work was because Bush, in contemptible concert with the money-hungry-for-war media, engaged in a months-old propaganda crusade to shove this battle down the throats of gullible Americans.

The majority in Congress does not support this war, nor do they especially support giving Bush a rough equivalent of carte blanche to attack anyone he wishes for almost any reason. This is what this resolution does, although you didn't hear that from any media source other than the New York Times -- and then buried paragraphs deep in their coverage of the resolution.

Bush claimed that this Congress is "one of the few" to authorize military action to defend our country and the cause of peace.

How absurd can one be? How ignorant are his speech writers?

My Dear Mr. President,

Let me remind you: The United States of America, as anyone who listened in on sixth grade history can tell you, has been at war practically every 20 years like clockwork since her birth -- through war -- in the late 1770s.

In case you haven't noticed, we've even gone to war against each other in one of the bloodiest wars ever recorded in history.

Let's face it -- it's almost as usual as it is unusual for the Congress either to place its imprimatur on another war, or to lower its head in ignorance as one president after another takes care of his associates and supporters in what was once called the "military-industrial complex."

During my short lifetime I loved my grandfather who was wounded in World War I, my father who was taken from our family for six years to help win World War II, my uncles who were wounded in the Korean "conflict," and my friends who were killed in Vietnam and at Kent State. I wish I had known the young American boys killed by our own in "Desert Storm", Kosovo, Somalia, -- and soon in Iraq.

Every twenty years, like clockwork.

You said, "We will face our dangers squarely, and will face them unafraid."
Easy to say, isn't it, Mr. Bush?

You spent your time in the "service" (a Texas Air National Guard "champagne squad") helping out Republican senators and partying, while your peers and mine died in Southeast Asia. I was a sole-surviving son. What was your excuse? And when Jeff Miller was shot down at Kent State by National Guard storm troopers, I spoke out against the Vietnam war. I kicked in doors, I spat on men like you who would offer up my friend's body for nothing more or less than money or ephemeral power.

Will you be leading our troops into battle during the next months, Mr. President?

No. One supposes you will be required to advise the Joint Chiefs on the finest strategy to defeat Hussein and take hold of Iraq's petroleum -- at least by "contract." Yes, a more dazzling strategic mind cannot be found -- and of course, your luminous handling of the economy, the poor who are without health care, and the management your own heretofore tragic and useless life is far more important than showing your backbone on the battlefield.

I want, I beg you, to allow me -- as a representative of the so-called "whining left" -- to stand next to you, Mr. President, when the body bags begin to flow into Andrews Air Force Base.

I want to stare into your eyes as you make a pretense of weeping for the very boys and girls for whom you've signed a death warrant today.

You tell us this morning that you "hope the use of force will not be necessary" -- yet even as you speak those words, your minions are massing, threatening other world leaders, spitting in the faces of other nations that are perhaps more thoughtful, more unlikely to plunge into war into order to save their own regimes.

Yet you continue threatening them, cajoling them, pushing them to join your ghoulish little world of small-minded and weak men who think that Darwin was wrong, that women have no right to control their own bodies, and that people should have to work for so little money that they are forced to live six-to-a-trailer to make ends meet while people like Dick Cheney fly on $60 million private jet aircraft.

You tell us that confronting Iraq is "necessary", yet you refuse to tell us why except with bland generalities, hocus-pocus, mirrors, tricks -- all designed to obfuscate your incompetence in stopping the fanatic Osama bin Laden, who murdered so many in New York, Washington, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

What if Saddam, or Tony Blair, or some Middle Eastern potentate demanded that you give up OUR weapons of mass destruction? What would you do then? What if that threat came from a nation who could paralyze us with some new weapon -- or some new strain of deadly virus that could be delivered on the wind?

What action would you take then?

Oh, you imprudent tiny man. You cannot stop the Husseins of this world. Another will rise up in his place -- there in the Desert, or on some island in Pacific Asia, or somewhere else on this earth. Yes, you can kill them, one by one as you must, but you cannot stop them by killing the innocents around them.

And don't bore me with another lie that you can't murder Saddam. Of course you can. You could do it yourself. Invite him to dinner -- then kill him. It's that simple. But it isn't he or his kind that you want dead -- it's Iraq and its oil that must change character, that must fit into your walnut chess box.

Haven't you heeded the record books, the tomes written about the foolishness of conquering peoples so far from home? No, of course not. You are a symbol of the dumbing down of America -- a true Limbaughian, a moron who sits in his trailer and waits two hours, phone to his ear, to tell other idiots over the so-called "EIB" (Excellence in Broadcasting) Network that he supports stupid little wars that make stupid little men wealthy. You are also Roger Ailesian -- a fake with a penchant for booze and blondes who systematically counts on the stupidity and the downright gullibility or the American psyche.

And look who surrounds you. A black Republican Secretary of State who most Republicans wouldn't let shower in their country or fitness club locker rooms. Another Republican of African ancestry, the incompetent National Security Advisor, who cut her teeth working under some of the most corrupt men and women in our nation's recent history. These are two people who are either slyer than foxes or dumber than dumb. To be black and Republican in America is indistinguishable from being Jewish and a Nazi in 1930s Germany. And no, neither I nor anyone with a brain buys the typical Republican line about Democrats being racists and "using" black voters by keeping them in poverty. One should choke himself to crippling when uttering that tired, ailing lie.

Then there's your Vice President, under investigation right now for heading a giant oil-services corporation -- at an average salary with benefits of $20 million a year -- touting, publicly, the "tax" strategies of the felonious Arthur Anderson, and who stood laughing at the mom and pop investors for believing his over-reporting Halliburton profits by some 40%. That same man -- Dick Cheney -- was also running the board room at Halliburton when it set up a Cayman Island Company - called, astutely, "Halliburton Caymans" in order to subvert the U.S. laws making it a crime to sell oil drilling equipment to none other than Saddam Hussein.

Have you ever, seriously, asked Cheney about that?

Look who surrounds you, Mr. President. A Treasury Secretary who's a "nice guy" but can't find his way around "QuickBooks Pro"; a Transportation Secretary who has mucked up everything from airline competence and safety to Amtrak; an Attorney General who spends more time on his knees praying to Jesus for guidance (or more likely thanking Him for letting him get away with whatever he does do), or covering up the naked breasts of the bronze "Blind Justice" because ostensibly it offends him (more likely it arouses him).

Look at your public supporters -- and look hard. There's Rupert Murdoch, a megalomaniacal ultra-right winger that might make Göring blush. There's Roger Ailes, Rupe's fat, out-of-control despicable henchman whose sole purpose is to front for your office. And let's not forget Rush Limbaugh, the loud-mouthed uneducated blowhard who shouts over anyone who doesn't agree with him and uses his money to attack the weak and the poorest among us. What about Bill O'Reilly, the self-appointed keeper of The Book, who engages our people in witch hunts against rock stars, publishers, retailers, or anyone else who doesn't burn books and records that offend that little man with the teeny mind? Then there's Sean Hannity, another spawn of Fox News, a man without a high school education who dresses like a mafia don and uses liberals as urinals on cable television to entertain Murdoch, Ailes, and FOX News Channel's sheep-like viewers. There's Tom DeLay, who catted around Mexico with none other than Newt Gingrich charging up whores on an American Express Card (ask Marianne Gingrich if you don't believe me, about that). Did you think Gingrich actually resigned because he was fed up with Clinton? What about Peggy Noonan, the sad once-cute little lush? What about the vicious, sexually-starved Ann Coulter, paid by men like Dick Scaife to write lie after lie about any Democrat who seeks to stop the evil among us?

Are you really this brainless, President Bush?

I could go on for hours listing one malevolent after another who is on your side, but why bore you? Even you must know the wreckage who surrounds you -- the bowers and scrapers that might just do anything for just another few seconds of air time, for just another few bucks, for just another night with a young innocent stupid girl in a Washington hotel room.

And you're bleating about some idiot who couldn't deliver a warhead on target to Israel only 200 miles away? Perhaps you should be worried about your own back yard -- and perhaps you should start thinking about cleaning house.

If you don't, you won't get a second chance at that Oval Office.

Look. I know damn well you're not exactly a Nobel laureate, Mr. President, but that doesn't matter -- neither were most of our Presidents. Your problem is the men and women that surround you. They are your ticket to success. Not your Daddy's friends. Not the reactionary fossils wearing Cold War blinders that crawled out from the sewers of history to try and muck up the world in the name of "freedom" and "democracy" just one more time.

Hasn't is occurred to you that these men and women are NOT the best and the brightest?

Or have your handlers and gatekeepers kept the nickname given your administration and used even by critics on "your" side of the aisle?

"The Worst and the Dimmest."

That's what they're calling your team -- the dregs of the once-elite, now embarrassed has-beens.

Look to the men and women who turned you down when you chose your Cabinet and your inner circle of advisors -- it may behoove you, they may be your deliverance.

And who are the members of this "global coalition" that you spoke of today? England -- a mere client state of America! France and Russia laid down the law yesterday at the UN.

The bottom line: you won't be leading any "coalition" Mr. President. Instead, you'll be stuck at the front of a funeral cortège with some hangers-on who are afraid you'll place crippling tariffs on their exports.

Face facts. You resonate through the schoolyard of nations like a bully. You told the world that Iraqis are not part of the "civilized" world. Are WE so civilized, Mr. President? How many men and women did you put to death in Texas, Mr. President? How many might have been innocent? Two? Six? A dozen? Fifty? Are you so civilized? Don't we possess and are we not armed with "biological and chemical weapons and ballistic missiles? Don't we promote international terror using client states as the perpetrators?

And, Mr. President, we not only HAVE nuclear weapons, but we are the only "civilization" to have ever used them -- more than once -- killing thousands of children in the process.

I make no claim that we should not have used those weapons of mass destruction on the Japanese. They may have deserved it. But then, they were killing and torturing our boys, and we had proof of that -- far too much proof.
I want you to pay attention and to realize that when you describe Iraq - or any nation with any financial and therefore military wherewithal -- you are describing our nation as well.

We too have "a history of mass murder, striking other nations without warning; of intense hatred for [other] Americans; and of contempt for the demands of the civilized world."

We murdered, we slaughtered American Indians by the tens of thousands to seek our "manifest" destiny. We hated Indians, Japanese, Africans, Hispanics, Mexicans and anyone else that stood in the way of the great economic powers that had our nation in a stranglehold even before she was born.

We had contempt for the civilized world of Great Britain -- a nation five times our age that also sought to control and financially enslave upstarts. In the end she failed and is now Britain, seen by many narrow-minded Yanks as nothing more than a giant theme park for royalty-struck westerners who cannot get enough of excess and greed.

You said today:

>>> If Iraq gains even greater destructive power, nations in
>>> the Middle East would face blackmail, intimidation, or attack.
>>> Chaos in that region would be felt in Europe and beyond. And
>>> Iraq's combination of weapons of mass destruction and ties to
>>> terrorist groups and ballistic missiles would threaten the
>>> peace and security of many nations. Those who choose to live in
>>> denial may eventually be forced to live in fear.

Let me remind you that if any Middle Eastern power -- including Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and still perhaps Jordan -- gained enormous destructive power they might too attempt to intimidate or attack their neighbors -- or maybe even the United States, for we do, Mr. President, threaten at least to some extent the stability of those populations, do we not?

Do we not allow the most disgraced "reverends" Jerry Falwell and Marion "Pat" Robertson, the Mormon Church, and every disintegrating televangelist in Texas to send our young women, loaded with tempting food and luxurious bribes, to proselytize and intimidate Muslims and Buddhists to accept Christ as their savior?

If Saddam was sending thousands into BumChuck, Texas -- where you live -- tempting Texans with something they dearly needed to live (approximating oil), don't you think those same Texans would be angry -- bitterly angry about that? -- especially each time one of their daughters donned a bhurka and quit school to submit to their new Islamic husbands?

You tell us that Iraq was "given 15 days to disclose all weapons of mass destruction." (And why do you insist on using that half-assed ridiculous term anyway -- don't you reflect we are all just sick to death of it?)

But your Daddy didn't do a thing about Saddam when he didn't follow orders did he. And the Republican-controlled Congress didn't do a thing about it either -- did they? Nor did Bill Clinton.

Were they all stupid, or were they measured, balanced and assured that Saddam Hussein posed about a zero threat to our nation.

You whine that the Iraqis don't want you to search the presidential palaces. Well frankly, I don't care if you dissolve those palaces -- cremate them -- but you wouldn't let Saddam inspect your ranch, would you? Or your home in Maine? Or the other little nests you might have scattered about the country?

Oh, and how many "square miles" is Camp David? You sneer that Saddam has 12 square miles of palaces.

And who exactly gave Iraq 15 days to full disclose? Your daddy? The United Nations -- of its free will? Or were those assembled in New York that day cowering in fear of our might and our propensity to use it?

And while you are "fully and finally remov[ing] some real threat to world peace and to America", why not move ahead to Syria, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, perhaps even Mexico? They are all potentially our mortal enemies. Under your logic, we might as well mop them up as well. No?

You say that Iraq must comply with the "world's" demands, yet the "world" has not demanded anything from Saddam. You and your friends have. More than half the American people aren't demanding anything from Saddam either -- so how can you say, with that nasty straight bully-boy face so filled with odium and rage at your own ineptness, that the "world" demands anything at all of Iraq?

The world demands nothing.

Your world does.

It is more likely, my President, that the "world" is performing as the pathetic, feeble, knee-socked schoolboy in shorts who will collaborate with the meanest bully, even though the schoolboy loathes him -- in order to save his own neck.

Isn't that what you meant to say?

Do you know how asinine you sound? Here you are, the leader of the most militarily dominant nation that history has had the pleasure or displeasure to witness. Here you are, the son of a son of a son of a son of one of America's premier fathers. And here you are threatening some once-removed dimwit vagrant camel cowboy who presides over a desert fiefdom filled with people living somewhere in the 18th Century.

Why are you threatening him? Do you think that Saddam has even a scintilla of a chance to defeat the United States? Do you think that you look any better than Hitler when he threatened Europe with domination if it did not do as he said, be as he wanted, as they were told?

You are not Hitler, Mr. President. You're a fun, once hard-drinking, womanizing, born-again Christian who was a pretty good intramural ball player at Yale. You're a man of privilege. Why on earth would you allow who you are to be turned into who others want you to be -- and without a fight?

You're from MY generation, Mr. President. Surely we must share so many of the same attitudes, fears, respects, hopes, and dreams. Mine do not include marching my son off to some God-forsaken desert to fight for more oil to fill my Porsche.

If you think we must have that oil -- and you might be able to make at least a coherent argument there -- then just bomb the heck out of all "them A-Rabs." Split the oil with the other world "powers" and call it a day. But don't condescend, don't patronize and humiliate the American people through pretense. Simply tell the truth. It's always far better in the end.

You are not sending men to be killed in Iraq because Iraq is now, after more than a decade an instant, and might I add a "convenient in every way", threat to Americans.

If Iraq is a threat, then what was the Soviet Union? I say no threat at all. Never was, never will be.

Iraq is about as much danger to the United States as is Puerto Rico. They don't like us much either -- and they're much closer.

You know, Mr. President, it's always easy to find enemies hiding under rocks -- and there are always men driven by their reptilian brains that look for those lizards, and make them into mythical raptors that threaten everyone's existence -- even though they don't. There are no Americans financing Saddam as your grandpatron -- Prescott Bush -- financed Hitler before he realized Germany's threat to America.

Times are different now. News travels faster.

In the alternative, why not be a man and choose off Saddam? Yes. That would be a first-rate idea. If you won, you would be elected President for Life. We would change the Constitution for you.

If you lost, well -- so what? We could still bomb the hell out of them and rescue you.

Think of the money we'd save. Think of how many kids we could subscribe to Blue Cross; how many babies in Africa we could treat for their parents' endowment of AIDS. Think of what we could do with that $600 billion you're about to hand over to General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin.

Reflect on it.

Oh yes -- may God bless your work too.