Crankcase

Monday, December 15, 2003

And so begins the holiday parties. We had our company party this past Saturday. Nothing really out of the ordinary as company holiday parties go. Last year ended with police and medical personnel (I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that someone had way, way too much to drink). This one was much quieter by comparison. Ladies overdressed to the nines, as if the Queen Mother was going to stop in for a brief chat on bridge design. The menfolk hammering down as much liquor as the one-hour open bar would allow them. Handshakes and pecks on the cheek from co-workers that corporate policy barely lets you stand in the same room with. The awkward rubbing of elbows and wishing of cheer to the big bosses. The same dry speeches about retirees, productivity and profits. The standard issue door prizes (although the travel mug is a big improvement over the key chain and radio tracking collar set they gave us last year). If you’ve lived the corporate life or have been to one of these parties as a guest, you’ve probably seen and heard all that I’m talking about.

And while all of this was going on, our dear friend turned enemy Saddam was being wrested from his latest hidey hole. As an American citizen who is opposed to the war, I’m not sure how I should feel about this. On the one hand it’s nice to see that, despite all of his paranoia and wealth, we captured him in a little hole in the dirt. Yet since the start of the war, I can’t see why we turned all of our attention on him in the first place. True, he was a tyrant of his own people, but we have played nice with tyrants in the past (at least until the rest of the world said something about it).

But didn’t the war start because of 9-11? Did we ever find hard proof that Saddam did anything more than verbally approve of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center? Money transfers, taped conversations with Osama, anything? As far as I can see it, the wonderful game of "Where’s Waldo bin Laden?" got old and we switched to a new target: Saddam. And why not? To the American people, it was a sore spot that we never ran roughshod over Baghdad when we had the chance in 1991. To Bush, it’s old fashioned Texas justice: to right the wrongs your father never could. To voters, it makes you want to believe in America again, to put some bones back in our collective spines. Screw all this namby-pamby diplomacy, we demand action!

And to all of that I say: it’s a great way to win an election, but this is no way to even try winning a war, much less start one. Terrorism has been around almost as long as there have been people to take opposing sides of a situation. Terrorism is something that will not be wiped off the face of the earth like polio. It will be like the flu virus, forever changing and adapting, killing as it goes and forcing others to find ways to fight it. Capturing Saddam was a start, but by no means an end. Although I’m not one to agree much with Lilek’s political views, I do agree with this quote from Monday’s blog:

We live in an age where we’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it does. And drop again it will.

And unless we capture our original quarry or find out that he’s now a rust colored stain in an empty cave in Afghanistan, that shoe will most likely be a sandal dropping on our heads again.

posted by: Jiggsy at 12/15/03 12:04 | link | comments (2) |

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posted by: Jiggsy at 12/15/03 12:04 | link | comments (2) |

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