by James Glaser
February 3, 2005

I am not about to boast of my brilliance about American foreign policy, but I do read a lot on the subject and listen to people from both sides talk about it. What I have found is that so many of us think that the United States was ordained by some liturgical entity to lead the rest of the world.

I will admit that I love this country and I hold a deep respect for our Constitution and Bill of Rights Because of that, I look at where our leaders are taking us and I have to believe that they do not respect the same things that I do.

Probably from the very beginning of our country, money and power corrupted our leaders. In the early years of our nation the power in Washington to control everything was enough to satisfy that lust for power. Today, local power is not enough and now Washington wants to control the whole world. That lust for power has gotten the best of our leaders.

Oh sure they will tell you that we have to lead because we have to bring freedom and democracy to the world. They say this, like we are perfect here at home and we have nothing more to work on to make our nation better.

For years I have been a carpenter and when you build things, you always tend to build them the way the person who taught you did. However if you work all around this great nation, you find that there many ways to build the same thing. Many paths to the same goal and after a while you find that almost all of the different building techniques work and you start adopting the ones that work best for you

Now our leaders in Washington are running all around this Globe telling the rest of the world that our way of building a nation is the only way and that we are willing to kill and maim tens of thousands of their people if they don't fall into line and build their nation the way we tell them to. George Bush is telling the world that his type of democracy is the only way to attain freedom.

What bothers me is that so many Americans believe that Bush and Washington are pushing this democracy out of the goodness of our hearts and that we only have the best of intentions for mankind.

Many Americans think we are pushing our ideas on everyone to help them and that because we are so perfect, everyone must be able to see we know what is what. Most of the people who believe this are well-off and White. Black, Red and Brown Americans can tell you that we have a ways to go before we start telling the rest of the world that we have the answers to their problems. America may profess to be Christian, but Loving Your Neighbor is still hard to do for many.

Jesus Christ said that there was no greater commandment than "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength." Then he next said "The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these."

That seems pretty simple to me. George Bush and many Americans will claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, but right now we are killing tens of thousands of "our innocent neighbors" in Iraq. We are turning their cities like Fallujah, (a city with over 200 places of worship) into rubble and what kind of love is it to displace 300,000 neighbors at a time. Where do the people of Fallujah go when we tell them we are about to destroy their city? Those people lost everything and we are doing this in Christ's name? George Bush will tell you that he is.

The real truth is that it all comes down to money and power. Don't kid yourself. Some Americans are making billions off the suffering of the people in Iraq. Yes, it can be said that it is good that we got rid of Saddam, but that wasn't enough.

George Bush wanted more and those who back him needed to sell more bombs, bullets, and equipment, and then there is Iraq's oil. If we just wanted to free the Iraqi people, well we did that in a matter of weeks. No, many American Corporations wanted much more, so George Bush put out the challenge to the rest of the world and told every nut-case around the globe to "Bring em on."

Bush taunted every young American hater in the world and left our troops in Iraq for bait and it worked. People from all over the globe came to Iraq and joined Iraqi nationals (just like any red blooded American would have) who wanted us out of their country.

All Americans have to think about is what we would feel like if foreign troops were on every street corner in America. What we would feel like if the torture pictures that came out in Iraq, were pictures of Americans being tortured in our country by foreign troops. All we have to picture is what it would feel like if foreign troops were busting down the doors of American homes in the middle of the night. Real Americans, if they think about what we have done to the Iraqi people will start to understand why there is an insurgency over there and why the Iraqis are attacking the "American Liberators."

We now know that the Bush administration pays journalists to tell us what they want us to believe. You want to call that freedom?

Washington keeps telling us that the Iraqi insurgency is made up of Sunni tribesmen who were in power under Saddam and that no one else, other than the terrorists that Bush taunted into coming, are fighting us. I don't buy that. Every parent of every child we killed hates us. Every husband of every wife we killed hates us. Every child of every parent we killed hates us.

This is the truth. We don't count the number of innocent Iraqis we kill, but we do count the number of innocent Iraqis the insurgency kills.

There are now reports that put the number of Iraqis killed in this war anywhere from 15,000 to 100,000. The number of wounded and maimed must be close to a quarter of a million. We, our troops have suffered over 1,400 killed and over 11,000 wounded, so I would feel comfortable in thinking that the Iraqis have 10 wounded for every one killed too.

Still George Bush will Bible quote and tell the world we are doing all of this killing and maiming for God and the good of the Iraqi people, and in the next sentence he will say that we have to keep our troops there longer. Hey, we need the oil and George needs the "power" that being the Commander in Chief of a victorious Army gives him.

Plus there is always the fact that many Americans are getting rich off of Bush's war in Iraq. We also have to remember that there are tens of thousands of Americans, maybe hundreds of thousands of American workers, who have great paying jobs because of this war. Killing people brings prosperity to America.

We can keep telling ourselves that attacking other countries and killing tens of thousands of innocent people is really a good thing in the long run and that the people left will thank us some day for their new found freedom and democracy, but that isn't true.

The people in those foreign lands know that the people we leave in charge will be put there and many times be paid by Washington to do as we say. They will only be "free' as long as they play ball with us.

Americans will continue to delude themselves into believing that we are really a Christian Nation and that we are only trying to do as Christ told us, but that is not true either. Is it really so hard to understand? "But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." and "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Those are the words of Jesus Christ. They don't seem to be shrouded in mystery. They are easy to understand and easy to follow... if money and power don't get in your way.

Post Script

Yesterday a man by the name of Johhnie Sancedio of Terre Haute, Indiana sent me some things he had thought about our country and I used many of them in my column. From time to time other people do the same and I thank them all. There are a lot of paths our nation can take and many of those paths are known by ordinary people in Indiana, or Minnesota or any other State and it is really a shame that Washington has become so insulated from the rest of America, that they won't even allow a National debate before they change the course our country has been on for over 200 years. Now America is willing to attack anyone at any time. We have become what Japan and Germany were in WW II. We are now the country that starts wars and I think we should all have a right to talk about that policy.