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    Volume CCXXXII, Number 19        March, 2002              Page 4

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ALL ABOARD THE BAGHDAD EXPRESS!

IT IS WAR!

The American Eagle to Strike!!!

Our Lads to Singe the Mustache of the Evil Butcher of Babylon!

Our Commander-in-Chief Calls Us to the Colors!!

Great Upsurge of Popular Enthusiasm for Our Righteous Cause!!!

Washington City is suffering from a new plague: war fever. And it's loving every minute of it!

Fresh from triumph in Afghanistan, more or less, the brave Republicans of the War Cabinet are plotting the next target in the battle against anyone who made George Bush Sr. look like an idiot: Saddam Hussein. Despite the lack of anything resembling a connection between Hussein and the Al-Qaeda terrorists who savagely attacked the United States last fall, George W. is determined to succeed where his father failed.

This time he's got a whole Easy Company of armchair heroes, not to do any actual fighting, but to incite enough passion among his Republican investors to defeat those lily-livered nervous nellies who don't relish the thought of invading Iraq. In other words, soldiers.

You'd never know it from military masterminds like Generalissimo Paul Wolfowitz, Field Marshall Dick Cheney or every tin-pot's pinup, Condoleeza "Yes, Sir" Rice, but the professional soldiers whose well-trained troops would be on the receiving end of Iraqi bullets don't understand what if anything is going on here. Accordingly, in best military tradition, they are making the war plans sound as painful as possible -- 300,000 troops, six months' worth of supplies -- that sort of thing.

But whining brasshats don't move the battle-ready red-hots. Like anyone who manages to get no closer to combat then the latest Stephen Ambrose Xerox job, Wolfowitz, Bush and Cheney et al. know that war is hell, just not for them. Instead they paint magenta fantasies of how easy it will be to topple a dictator who has managed to survive two decades and two wars, at least one of which arrayed the whole earth against him. They theorize that a mighty Iraqi resistance force will rise as one when Paul Wolfowitz raises his outstreched hand.

The very elderly among us (like yours truly) remember when an earlier generation of know-nothing reactionaries sought to "roll back" "Red China" by "unleashing" Chiang kai-Shek. Chiang's mighty invasion force would sweep China clean of Communists had not they been held back by fuzzy-thinking fellow-travelers, i.e. Democrats. This imaginary strike force was dubbed by the late great A.J. Liebling as the "Rubber-type Army" because its size and power varied in proportion to the imaginations of Republican editorial writers and Senators. So too with the Iraqi "resistance."

Despite a decade of flailing, the United States has been unable to foster anything resembling a credible armed threat to Saddam Hussein. That is, since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. Those of us who weren't young and irresponsible back then may remember that Hussein was seriously threatened by a spontaneous and well-organized uprising that could easily have broken his grip on power with just a little bit of help from the mighty American Army then camped in Iraq. Too bad they were Shiite Muslims thought to be too friendly to Iran, because one man decided that Saddam was preferable to a pro-Iran government. They were left to be slaughtered by Saddam's Republican Guard under the muzzles of U.S. Army tanks. Who was that man who passed up the golden opportunity to rid the world of Saddam Hussein? And what was his relationship to the current President of the United States? As W. might say, "Thanks, Dad."