Only in America

By GERRY WARNER
Cranbrook Daily Townsman
Aug. 18, 2006
I used to have an American girlfriend years ago (please forgive me Sandra) who was fond of saying, "only in America." Well, on a short trip to Montana last week, I once again came to appreciate what good ol' Alison meant.
Some of you no doubt will remember Montana Senator Max Baucus, who caused quite a ruckus in Fernie a year or so ago when he invited himself to a public meeting and proceeded to tell his Canadian neighbors how they could take better care of the environment. If you don't recall the details, I'm sure MLA Bill Bennett would be glad tofill you in.
Well, on my brief foray across the line, I found myself camping one night in a little burg called Lincoln about 50 miles north of Helena, the state capital. Glancing through the Great Falls Tribune on a ridiculously warm night, I came across a headline all too tragically typical of the U.S. today: "Family friends honor Cpl. Baucus." You can easily guess the rest. Marine Cpl. Phillip E. Baucus was the nephew of Senator Max Baucus and he was blown up July 29 by a suicide bomber in Iraq's Al Anbar province. He had been married less than a year.
But sad to say, there's a bizarre twist to the story. At the funeral for the dead marine, which took place at the family ranch near Wolf Creek, a Kansas-based, fundamentalist religious group called the Westboro BaptistChurch we're also on hand to protest. Carrying signs saying among other things, "thank God for dead soldiers," the evangelical group was there because in the word of the Tribune story: "They believe the troops deserve to die because they fight on behalf of a government that, according to church beliefs, does not adequately condemn homosexuality."
As said at the top, "only in America."
At the scene," a Lewis and Clark County Sheriff told the angry crowd: "They have a constitutional right to be there." "Don't even look at them," yelled one of the counter-protesters.
Talk about a divided country, but in another story headed "Americans keep the faith," the Great Falls Tribune pointed out that many Americans are prepared to keep supporting the war effort even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the main stated reason for the war -- the belief that SaddamHussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction -- was patently untrue. A Harris poll released July 21, found that a full 50 per cent of Americans today still believe in the WMD fairy tale in spite of overwhelming evidenceto the contrary. People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, said opinion analyst Steven Kull. The story went on to say that a 16-month, $900 million investigation by the U.S. weapon hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group concluded Iraq dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N.oversight. That finding was reaffirmed by U.N. inspectors in 2002 and 2003 who found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.Despite this President George Bush -- mentor to the current Canadian Prime Minister -- went to war and the result has been the deaths of more than 2,600 American soldiers, more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 27 Canadian soldiers killed in "collateral action" in Afghanistan. And despite the bellicose rhetoric of media outlets like Fox News, many news sources have told Americans the truth about Iraq, but millions have chosen not to believe it. The same unfortunately applies to many Canadians. Again to quote from the AP/Tribune story. "The facts are that Iraq -- after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections -- acceded to the U.N Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002 to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead the U.S. invasion aborted that work."
You can't lay it out much more clearly than that and for me it was very interesting to see such a story in a newspaper in Montana, a staunchRepublican and right-wing state. The Tribune story about Cpl. Baucus' funeral referred to the evangelical protesters as "vile," not the kind of a word you usually come across in a hard news story but understandable in the circumstances. Yet only a day later in that very same newspaper appears a story spelling out in blinding detail that the war in Iraq, which has killed so many soldiers like Cpl. Baucus, is based on a sham. And it surely leads to the inescapable conclusion that the war in Afghanistan is no less of a sham.
Remember the old saying -- in war the first casualty is truth.
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