An Iraqi's Reflections On Bush's Re-Election

Economy (!), how can anyone elect bush for his economy achievements?! there have been 821,000 jobs lost since Bush took office in January 2001


Health care (!) who voted for him? The 44 million Americans who now live without health insurance?


Taxes, social security, energy, students’ grants, what?!
Nothing…

And then, comes the surprise!
Ethics!!
Yes!!
Ethics!!!!
Ethics as in principles as in morals as in being honest, as in (ehhmmm) not lying…
People elected him because they are concerned about ETHICS!!
And what is this noise all about?
About getting married
:*)
It’s about allowing people from the same sex to get married.

I mean, little bush should either give everyone the freedom, that he is unfortunately exporting, or act like a freaky neo-conservative in public and stop all the “sins”. I can’t see the point in considering all of this issue about gay marriage as an ethical issue. It is completely a small technical regulation, super super small. I don’t want to discuss what I think about the entire idea of homo-sexuality here, but my point is that there is a problem in understanding the basic terms in this simplified, reductive election campaigns.

Most of my friends in California and the west coast, and in New York, D.C. and the rest of the east coast were just searching for a non-bush solution. This is what I can call ethics, well… sort of. At least they had a problem with all the lies that bush told about Iraq and the war on terror, and wanted to punish such a corrupted administration by not voting for it, and choosing another similar candidate that is at least promising to seek an international coalition. This is something that can be put under the title “ethics”.

Speaking about Ethics, the other topic, which took the third or fourth rank, was the war on terror. Voters believed that bush is doing “well” in his terror, and he has a clearer “vision” comparing to kerry. This can happen in one case, if kerry is blind, and unfortunately he is. He is totally blind and without a vision that even bush looked like a wise guy comparing to him.

Let me tell you something about vision. I started working in Iraq after two days of the occupation; I used to have weekly meetings with other NGOs inside the so-called green zone, and I saw how many times the U.S. administration changed their plans. I was there since the time of garner, then the time of the dirty chalabi government, then the circus of bremer that changed his “strategies” more than 5 times before he ran away, then now we have the CIA puppet Allawi and his mentor negroponte hiding in a dark shelter in the burning green zone. The 18 billion dollars that the U.S. administration wanted to send to Iraq last year are still waiting, less than 600 Million dollars were spent and most of them were on US companies. Iraq, at the same time, spent more than 2.5 billion dollars from its own oil exports on US reconstruction companies and as compensation to other US companies. The reconstruction is a big lie by itself; the minimal infrastructure reconstruction didn’t start yet, and the size of destruction in the public sector caused by the unjustified US war is enormous. There isn’t any kind of vision or strategy about what happened in Iraq after the war. The war was the only planned thing concerning Iraq. It is a perfect “hit and run” operation.

bush and blair lied about the war. Blair came on TV and admitted that, but bush is still lying. Isn’t it a big problem that bush is a liar?
He is a killer, he killed tens of thousands of Iraqis because of his war. Other hundreds of Palestinians are being killed because of his administration’s political position.

US citizens have a problem with facts, they don’t know the basic information about what is happening in this side of the world. And we should both work on this, you should know what is happening here because of your decisions, and we should know what is happening there because of us. We should work together to bring this wall down, we should work together to understand each other directly without depending on our government’s media.

Small bush is nothing more than a conservative religious freak, his clear victory today is a victory for right-wing, for extremists, for racists, for Osama Bin Ladin, for the legendary Zarqawi, for every arrogant snobby macho that believes the war on terror can be won by more tanks and missiles.

The victory of bush today, is a big defeat for anyone in the middle, like me.

http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com/