'Spinning' the war

One thing is for sure. I have stopped doodling "I love Laura Bush" in my comp book. This shocking new development took place after Mrs. Bush gave the president's weekly radio address last week. From the comfort of the first couple's home in Crawford, Texas, where they are busy stuffing turkeys and running a war, Laura Bush let the Taliban have it for their human rights abuses. \n"I'm delivering this week's radio address to kick off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by ... the Taliban ... Afghan women know, through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists. ...Women have been denied access to doctors when they're sick. Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays of joy are outlawed -- children aren't allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud. Women cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by themselves."\nTestify, Mrs. Bush.\nBut of course, you're a little late. The Taliban came to power in 1994, and their human rights abuses have been under attack by organizations such as Amnesty International since 1997. Through both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Afghan women have been the object of the United States' blind eye. \nAnd now, we've rescued them, and it's time to pat ourselves on the back. This Thanksgiving is different. It's not about Americans thanking their god, their community or their family for a host of blessings.\nIt's about Afghanistan being thankful for the United States. \nHow dare the Bush administration send Laura Bush to the airwaves to suggest that we've fought valiantly on behalf of the oppressed? Let's make one thing clear: The United States did not go into Afghanistan with Afghan women in mind. \nPresident George W. Bush bombed Afghanistan, armed the Northern Alliance and sent troops to the area because the United States had been attacked by a group of terrorists who were most likely connected to Osama bin Laden. This man is reported to have been in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war, and the Taliban has been accused of harboring him.\nThat is the long and short of it. \nIt boggles the mind that our government would cast about to make excuses for this war. And it is disgusting that we would use the real maltreatment of Afghan women to burnish our image as the protectors of freedom and justice. This attempt at a Captain America act, along with the president constantly referring to bin Laden as "the evil one," is part of a really sick effort to reduce the complexity of this war to that of a third grader's comic book.\nWhether or not the kind of war we have been waging is the appropriate course of action is beside the point. The point is, we cannot wave our flags and our sabers with gleeful grins, make a run at\nAfghanistan, and go home satisfied that because we are America, we have once again saved the day. What about the fact that for the first month of the war, we encouraged the Northern Alliance to do what they could to the Taliban, and now we're asking them to please not set up a government until the United States has put together a coalition of ethnic groups that don't necessarily want to work together?\nAnd what about the fact that Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Kahn released a statement reminding the world that the Northern Alliance has an "appalling human rights record?" These are the guys who are saving Afghan women from all that oppression?\nOr the fact that bin Laden could very well have crossed the Afghan border into Pakistan, where thousands of Pakistanis support his radical beliefs? \nFortunately, we've got Laura Bush to remind us that as complicated as these things are, a dose of mindless revisionism helps the turkey go down.