July 27, 2007 Washington, DC By: Kani Xulam Dear President Bush, I read with interest the lead article of the Washington Post about your presidency by Peter Baker on July 2, 2007. You were in Kennebunkport, Maine, getting ready for your meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. I then watched both of you on national television fielding questions from the reporters. You were jovial and your usual self. Mr. Putin looked a bit nervous and taut. The view behind you looked spectacular. The Atlantic Ocean was calm and inviting. Apparently, you responded to its call and took your pal fishing in it. The newspapers noted that the Russian had caught a fish. But in the article by the Post, it was more like you who were caught like a fish by Mr. Baker and put on display for millions of Americans as well as foreigners to see and feel so to speak. Because I work in the same city as you do, not very far from your office if I might add, I was intrigued with some of the details of the piece. So you wake up at five o’clock every morning. Mr. Kissinger gifted you a book, “A Savage War of Peace”, by Sir Alistair Horne. You invite scholars to the Oval Office and engage them in unfettered conversations about America’s standing in the world. Iraq has become the front and center preoccupation of your administration. Mr. Churchill is an idol of yours. His bust adorns one of the rooms of the White House, but Mr. Baker forgot to mention which one it was. I wish that were the only problem with the piece. The one that really bothered me was how you adore that half Albion half Yankee as if he were God’s representative on earth. If I were you, I would have sent that head of his to the storage room of the White House or given it back to the Britons. He is the source of your troubles. He is also the source of my discontent. He fathered the illegitimate state of Iraq that is now fighting the flower of your nation. I say you replace his sculpture with a picture of Woodrow Wilson. Your idol subscribed to the proposition that whatever was good for the Great Britain was good for the world. Mr. Wilson, on the other hand, was a saint relative to him. He had the decency to say stuff like what is good for the world is good for America. He subscribed to the principle of self-determination as a short cut to a semblance of peace and stability in the world. History has seconded him. Since you were a History major at Yale, I would be curious to know what you make of this? You are probably wondering about my nationality and thinking to yourself if my like or dislike of your idol has anything to do with my people’s losses or gains in the world relative to his policies. You are right on target. Do you know what your idol did when he fathered the illegitimate state of Iraq? Maybe I should answer this question by way of an analogy from the “Moving Tips” of Budget rental trucks. Moving Tip 32 states: “[when moving] don’t put your dog and your cat in the same box!” But Mr. Churchill didn’t care about the dogs or the cats or the camels or the goats if you will, especially after discovering oil in Kurdistan, and saw to it that the Kurdish goat would be tied to the Arab camel whether the two liked it or not. Both peoples lost their relative liberty and it has been an unmitigated disaster ever since. To be sure, that decision has nothing to do with the problems facing you or confronting Iraq today. The fighting, as you know, is among the Arabs themselves. You should be grateful to the Kurdish leaders for agreeing to stay a part of Arab Iraq for now. Between us, many of them are very afraid of you, some fearing that you might just pull another Kissinger trick on them. But leaving that apprehension aside, I think it is time you acted like a statesman to guarantee your place among the statesmen of the world. Yes, I know you are surrounded by a lot of nearsighted nay-sayers. Yes, I know many of them seek instantaneous gratification and care not a bit about the future generations. But I say you jettison them all, or one by one, for their disservice to you, your country and the imploding Middle East. I should perhaps expand on this business of making a statesman out of you. I know you don’t think much of the Kurds, but this one thinks you should read a book, Bismarck, by A. J. P. Taylor, to make you see behind the mountain as it were. The German chancellor talks about something called, the “Nationality Principle”, and how it was a source of war for Europe in his times as well ours. It took Europeans some 355 years, from the treaty of Westphalia to the end of the last century, to learn how to live along linguistic lines. That same sifting is now taking place throughout the Middle East. One blow to Saddam Hussein has freed five million Kurds. There are at least 30 million others waiting for the opportunity to proclaim their own freedoms. Don Rumsfeld, your former Secretary of Defense, used to say, “Freedom is messy thing.” Although universally disliked, he was right on target. Many in the West were content with the way Saddam Hussein was terrorizing the Kurds and the Shiites and miss the butcher of Baghdad to rein in the mayhem. The mayhem that they didn’t see or wouldn’t be bothered to be reminded of, the gassing of 281 Kurdish settlements for example, doesn’t figure in their myopic pronouncements. I resent that. That is like paraphrasing Churchill’s maxim, whatever is good for me is good for the peoples of the Middle East. I say you should do what Wilson would have done in the region and that is move the RIP sign overlooking Churchill’s grave in London to Baghdad and erect it over the state of Iraq. Anything less is bound to compound your problems. If people ask what you are doing, just say you are atoning for the sins of a knave, half Albion half Yankee, Winston Churchill. This letter first appeared in Soma, Issue # 26, July 2007, SOMA Digest is a subsidiary of KHAK Press & Media Center: http://soma-digest.com/
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