Askia At-Large
Election Day: Tsunami?
Askia Muhammad
Thursday, November 2, 2006

History will not permit us to describe the fate of Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea as having been determined by a “tsunami.”
  
It is also too early to describe the outcome of this year’s elections as “Tsunami 2006.” If the results turn out the way many polls are predicting that might be an apt description, and you might from now on be seen as a sage or a soothsayer. The off-year elections of 1994 were, after all, described as the “Republican Revolution.”
  
To be fair, President George W. Bush – all resemblance aside – is not Pharaoh, although his army is getting drowned over there, not far from the Red Sea.

As the election has approached, Mr. Bush has sharpened his rhetoric, leading his supporters literally to the “water’s edge” in terms of divisiveness and hostility.
  
His latest bombast is to declare that if his political opponents win this election, and impose their policies in Iraq, the “terrorists” we’ve been fighting there, ever since no “weapons of mass destruction” were found, will win the war. The war he led the country into, based on his manipulated intelligence that poor, Iraq – under sanctions, embargoes and a U.S.-imposed “no-fly-zone” over two-thirds of that country – was an imminent threat to the security of the United States.
  
“However they put it,” Mr. Bush told a political rally in Texas on Oct. 30, “the Democrats approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.”
  
Mr. Bush is of the deluded notion that the U.S. can “win” the “War on Terror” by winning it. That is the misguided policy that propels Israeli policy in occupied Palestine. It is most improbable that you can win a war against those whose ambition is martyrdom, by killing them. It is possible to kill millions and millions of poor people, but you have not killed poverty.
  
Mr. Bush insists that you cannot win a war if you are not willing to fight it. That makes sense, but what is the war? The United States went to war in Iraq based on Mr. Bush’s oft-repeated insistence that the Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” The American people had to commit to sacrifice their blood and treasure in that forlorn country back in 2003, because to delay might result in the discovery of the Iraqi weapons in the shadow of the “mushroom cloud” after a nuclear attack. Balderdash.
  
That message had no more currency then than a bucket full of warm dishwater and his protestations today are no more valid now than they were then. If the U.S. withdraws from the war into which it was led under false pretenses by the Bush administration, then those who have died will be dishonored. This country can only honor those who died in vain – based on what the leaders knew to be intelligence that had been manipulated in order to prove an already decided policy – by permitting others to die and by keeping military forces in that country, fighting, dying, flushing good money after bad.
  
That is the simple definition of insanity: doing things the same way they’ve always been done and expecting a different outcome.
  
Mr. Bush is not the crazy one. He’s crazy like a fox. It is those who follow him, hoping against hope, believing the lie despite every single shred of evidence which points to a failed policy – a policy which was doomed from the start because it was founded on untruth.
  
The sad part about this impending electoral tsunami, which the good people of this country may very well cause to happen on Nov. 7, is that most of the Democrats are afraid to tell the people the Truth and plead for a change in moral direction by the country.
  
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned us back during the Vietnam conflict that this country is on the “wrong side of the World Revolution.” The Democrats, because they want so badly to be elected, are not telling the people that the country and its policies must change. They are only saying that the managers of the failed policies must be changed.
  
Starting with Iraq and the Middle East, the U.S. must reverse its course. In order to have a future, the U.S. must atone for its evil done throughout its young history, apologize for slavery and for genocide against the Native Americans and make reparations to the victims of its sins.
  
Sadly, however, as correct as what I am saying may be, in the current atmosphere, where Mr. Bush and his allies have made their evil to be fair-seeming, it sounds as though I am the deluded one, dancing in the electoral end-zone before the touchdown has been scored.
  
Maybe “tsunami” is too strong a word for what is going to happen on Election Day. But the truth is it’s not too strong a judgment in light of all the evil that has been committed following the leadership now in power in Washington.

Askia Muhammad is editor of the National Scene News Bureau, which provides editorial, audio and photographic content for broadcast and print clients, including The Final Call, National Public Radio, Soundprint, WPFW-FM and The Washington Informer. His e-mail address is askia99@verizon.net