The puppet President

I want to share an article today entitled, "Bush Dances to Sour Music" by Joyce Marcel. It is about how Bush has played into Osama Bin Laden's hand and what is likely to happen next. Ms. Marcel reports that she tried to explain matters to a friend from another country:

He was a wastrel youth of enormous privilege and arrogance, I said, propped up by his family's money and his father's connections, a man who went bust at everything he tried to do on his own, yet who, somehow, always emerged unscathed. After he got himself elected - or after the first of two elections was stolen for him, if you will - it became obvious that he was a puppet whose strings were held by many masters.

Dick Cheney holds one string, with his dreams of the golden crown of empire. The Bush family holds another, with its hatred of the Kennedy dynasty and its determination to have one of their own. Karl Rove holds one, with his dream of an endless one-party (conservative Republican) state. The inheritors of immense wealth hold another, with their dreams of reversing the New Deal and returning the populace to its "rightful" place as peasants. The oil industry holds one, and so does the nuclear power industry, although they often pull in tandem. The coal and logging industries share one. So do the rabid pro-Israel neoconservatives and the equally rabid Christians who believe they are the favored ones of God.

But as I talked, I realized that it was not a stretch to say that another string is held by the rogue Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, and that Bush is also dancing to his tune.
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[Bin Laden] wanted to destroy the American economy by luring it into a vast, expensive, unwinnable war. He wanted to prove that America and the West were corrupt imperialists with nothing but scorn for the Muslim world. He wanted to create political turmoil in the Middle East. He wanted to create a huge uprising of young, idealistic Muslim terrorists who would fight to the death against Western culture and religion.
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Americans have died [in Iraq] every day, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and the American wealth that isn't being stolen there is being squandered instead. A full-scale insurgency against the United States has been mounted. New terrorists have been created. Bin Laden must be proud.
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Because America cannot find enough soldiers or money to start another ground war in Iran, it is a strong possibility that Bush will use nuclear weapons there. And if Bush does not use American nukes, he will likely support the Israelis when they use theirs.

The country I love will be a pariah among nations for centuries to come.

Somewhere in the world, bin Laden is still alive and free and laughing.

This is my overriding concern. Bush loves power and violence so much that I believe he truly wants to use nuclear weapons. It is imperative that we all make our voices heard that we strenuously oppose this possibility.