Wednesday, August 30, 2006

How to Start a Revolution

Dear Indigna,

It's common knowledge that the Bush Administration expected the Iraqis to embrace our troops as "liberators" and thought the fall of Saddam would spur a spontaneous outbreak of American-style democracy. Instead, as it turned out, the Iraqi people are acting as if they view the U.S. as an occupying force and are uniting against us. Similarly, it seems that Israel thought its carpet bombing of Lebanese civilian infrastructure would cause the Lebanese to rise up against Hezbollah, and has been surprised that instead the people have turned against Israel. Does the Bush Administration still expect a bombing campaign against a civilian population in, say, another large and powerful Mid-East nation, to cause those people to support the attackers?

Same Strategy, Different Result?
Classified APO

Dear "Same,"

Well of course they do! It strains credulity that things have not gone the way that Cheney and Rumsfeld anticipated. The only reason there wasn't a great uprising against the American government after the Pearl Harbor bombing was because Japanese is so freakishly hard to learn! The bombing of the Oklahoma City Murrah Building would doubtless have caused a massive embrace of Branch Davidianism if only it hadn't been, frankly, a kinda weird and creepy religion. And 9/11 certainly put this "Stockholm Syndrome"-type theory to the test, didn't it, resulting in mass protests against the U.S. government and its policies across the world (though not, apparently, in the U.S. itself).

So it seems clear the problem rests with the American populace. We set the tone, people! To counteract the language problem that short-circuited a Pearl-Harbor inspired revolution, we should step up to the plate and parachute thousands of English language teachers into the "problem areas" of the Middle East. Once those Iraqis and others feel confident that they can speak American I'm sure they'll instantly embrace everything about our great United States.

As for our religion, that should be no barrier. Unlike Branch Davidianism, Christianity isn't the slightest bit weird and creepy. We know for a fact, from years of evangelizing experience, that the very moment that the infidels hear the word of God's son, Jesus Christ, they will immediately see the Light and the Way and embrace our non-creepy religion, especially the part about transsubstantiation.

As for the failure of democracy to take root instantly like a massively invasive non-native plant that kills everything else and that you can never, ever eradicate from your yard, it's clearly the fault of a lack of education about democracy in these backward countries and their primitive schools. We need to send in political scientists who can teach the people about American-style democracy. Once they grasp the beauty of our pure and efficient system, in contrast to whatever kind of "government" they've managed to cobble together, they will clearly favor our measured debate-and-vote, checked-and-balanced, reasoned and non-contentious Republican form of oligarchy. I mean democracy.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home