So there you have it, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Took about a month. A pretty impressive butt-kicking at first glance, not that anyone expected much else in a war between the greatest techno-military fighting force ever purchased and the mainly dispirited and destitute soldiers of a nation 1/22 its size.
But we're safer, right?
Dubious.
Safer from Iraq certainly, never mind that it was not a tangible threat in the first place. Safer from Syria and Iran and North Korea, probably, each being a little more skittish now that George W. Bush has made himself violently clear: smackdown first, nuance later, if ever.
But safer from al-Qaida, from Hezbollah, from Islamic Jihad?
No way.
Those fellas live among us, and they're madder than ever. We've just handed them a globally televised month's worth of programming that they'll gleefully reinvent as proof of the new anti-Muslim crusade. That's a position not so effectively dispelled when, as Maureen Dowd pointed out on Monday's op-ed page, the evangelist Franklin Graham, on record as calling Islam "a very wicked and evil religion," is invited to be the guest speaker at Pentagon Good Friday services.
If there are images from Bush War II that will serve as remotely comforting, they exist almost exclusively within the photographical history of Americans in uniform, none more emblematic than Jessica Lynch.
Is there any better testament in this month's war to the uniquely American hallmarks of courage and duty than that 19-year-old West Virginian? Not likely. Jessica on the cover of Newsweek, sitting by that tree in her civvies, bedridden with the same calm fire in her eyes, all absolutely indelible.
Her story, once it's through the multimedia wringer, Hollywood and back, will save her from the financial fate of many of the rest of the 250,000 Americans who can't come home soon enough. Because while it is routinely commending the performance of America's fighting men and women as wholly magnificent, which is virtually inarguable, the Bush administration simultaneously set about the business of slashing veterans' benefits to accommodate its unconscionable tax cut.
Jessica Lynch might be able to afford the education for which she enlisted to begin with, but the same can't be said for the thousands like her.
Military pay, veterans' pensions and educational assistance were the primary targets of a proposed $15 billion reduction in veterans' benefits over the next 10 years that Bush sent the House of Representatives to accommodate what was then a proposed $726 billion tax cut.
Most of the tax cut, lest we forget, was to be accomplished by removing the tax on corporate dividends, which go to roughly the top quarter of Americans who own stock. The Senate effectively chopped the tax cut in half last week, but the final accounting begins in earnest next month.
It would take only about a 2 percent adjustment in the tax cut package, which is designed to stimulate the economy, or at least that portion of it related to yacht repair, to maintain veterans' benefits at their current level. Veterans have a healthy lobby, but it won't likely be forceful enough to make the government stand by the educational guarantees that attracted the likes of Jessica Lynch.
What the administration has made good on in this war, of course, are its back-alley promises to corporate cronies looking to capitalize on the destruction of Iraq. Bechtel Group, its chief political operative being George Shultz, secretary of state in the Reagan administration, just got awarded a $680 million government construction contract through a process that mocked the spirit, if not the letter, of protocols governing fairness in the bidding process.
That puts Bechtel at the head of the class of U.S. corporations, most of them stalwart Republican campaign contributors, who will ultimately illustrate what Bush War II was all about: corporate opportunism. With Bechtel leading the reconstruction effort and Halliburton, the last corporate address of Vice President Dick Cheney, in charge of getting Iraqi oil infrastructure back up and running, American troops will be able to come home and set about the self-destructive process of wondering exactly what they'll get for making it all possible.
Not much, I'm afraid. But they're just soldiers; it's not as if they're oil company executives or anything.
Bush and Cheney, both of whom purposefully avoided the service during Vietnam, will just have to sleep with that.
And don't worry. Those guys sleep well.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
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