Sopping up the Blood with a Policy Paper

Dear George,

Have you noticed how torrential tears of moral indignation are flooding the gutters as the nation celebrates the fifth anniversary of your Iraq Enterprise? To listen to your critics one would get the impression that the streets of Baghdad were littered with dead women and children.

Some decry the war’s madness and see it as a desperate act by a group of angry old men seeking to regain their lost virility through the wholesale slaughter of innocents. Others are unable to stomach the fact that America is finally coming out of the closet and showing the world that it is now, and always has been, a low-life street thug running a highly successful extortion racket.

When you get down to it, there are two reasons the Iraq Enterprise is such a hard sell. First, it was built on a firm foundation of 935 lies. Now, all wars are grounded in lies, since lies are the only way a nation can goad its citizens into getting shot up. This is why wars must be driven by the Noble Ideal that conceals the fact that modern wars are fought primarily to protect the corporate bottom line.

Iraq was a challenge because, being so unnecessary, it required an inordinate number of lies to get it rolling. (It is a tribute to your leadership that you have kept the Enterprise going even as your multiple lies have gone up in smoke.)

The second reason is a little more abstract. It is a truism that no country engages in a war; it implements a policy. War is simply the execution of a policy that seeks to expand a country’s markets or to lock up certain natural resources such as oil or precious metals. Again we get back to the role of the Noble Idea since people aren’t too keen on giving their lives for a policy.

The beauty of policy is that it never bleeds. Policy knows nothing of the body odor and muck that are a part and parcel of war. It remains isolated from the blood, sweat and stench with which war reeks; it is walled off from wars consequences that are reduced to dried dingleberries that rattle round the empty skulls of the bureaucrats who implement war’s policy.

Those who call the invasion a war crime forget that only losers are guilty of war crimes. Victory has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with establishing innocence.

Now America is ready to elect a new Warrior-in-Chief who, like you, will draw his inspiration more from Max Sennett than from von Clausewitz. I salute you for leaving him a war he can practice on.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones