Wed Feb 08 2012

Harvey Wasserman

John Kerry must (again) make love, not war
September 20, 2004

This presidential campaign is stuck in the sixties and seventies, right where it belongs.

That's when the preppy draft dodger George W. Bush thought the Beatles were "weird," possibly because, as Kitty Kelly says, he heard them too often on cocaine. He was also the quintessential Chickenhawk, content to see others die in a war he backed but ducked.

That was Vietnam. Now---Oops, he did it again---it's Iraq.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew full well in 1972 that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. They looked into calling off the election, broke into Democratic Party headquarters, dirty tricked George McGovern (with the help of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney), then drunk drove the nation right into a jungle quagmire.

In the age of oil and global warming, that fever swamp has become desert quicksand. But the catastrophe's the same, except now we're also burdened with the last one.

Bush seems morally and mentally incapable of doing anything but plunging deeper, not only into Iraq but into fiscal, ecological, moral and spiritual psychosis.

Bush's Foxist media calls this "resolute leadership." But Iraq is exactly as unwinnable as Vietnam.

There's only one possible outcome---the Americans will leave. Off the rooftop of an embassy. In unphotographed body bags. With terror bombs exploding. With pipelines in flames. With the economy in tatters. With fundamentalists in charge in both Baghdad and Washington.

The only question in Iraq---like Vietnam---is how many people will die and how many billions squandered before the defeat can no longer be air brushed or blamed on peace activists.

John Kerry could have avoided Vietnam. But he went, earned his medals, then came home and became a true hero. The incredibly brave, painful work of those Vietnam Vets Against the War ranks amongst the greatest American acts of patriotic valor and service.

Today the realest human drama in this sorry presidential campaign is a nation---and world---desperate to see John Kerry's inner anti-warrior fight again.

Kerry's Senate vote authorizing Bush to attack Iraq was a terrible mistake. When will he finally fling it over the White House fence?

The Democrats' criticisms have sharpened as this psychotic war's illegality, arrogance and unwinnability have become as overwhelmingly obvious as Vietnam after Tet.

So has the fact that George W. Bush is the worst president this nation has ever seen, from civil rights and liberties to the ecology, economy, military, security, global relations, global warming...you name it. The laws of nature and karma may ultimately bring him down, as they did Richard Nixon. But who will give the definitive push?

John Kerry became a hero correctly renouncing a war that poisoned America's soul and drove this nation to the brink of ruin.

Iraq is about to finish the job. And once again, John Kerry has a line he must cross.

The hour is getting late. And the whole world is watching.

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HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE U.S. is available at www.harveywasserman.com . He is co-author, with Bob Fitrakis, of the newly published IMPRISON GEORGE W. BUSH www.freepress.org.

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