THE MORON MAJORITY

Wed Mar 19,10:13 PM ET

By Ted Rall

An American Warlord Races to Waterloo



NEW YORK--Now it's official: most Americans are idiots.



Decades of budget cuts in education are finally yielding results, a fact confirmed by CNN's poll of March 16, which shows that an astonishing 51 percent of the public believe that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.



There is no reason to think that. None. True, George W. Bush has asserted the existence of indirect links between low-level Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence officials--a lame lie repeatedly denied by the CIA (news - web sites)--but even our professional prevaricator has never gone so far as to accuse Saddam of direct involvement in 9-11. Despite their increasingly tenuous grasp on reality, not even the Bush Administration's most fervent hawks deny that the secular dictator of Iraq (news - web sites) is a mortal enemy of the Islamist extremists of Al Qaeda. No mainstream media outlet has ever reported otherwise.



So why do these pinheads think such a thing?



Simple: the official Bushie pretexts given for launching a unilateral invasion of Iraq don't stick. If Saddam was going to launch nukes or anthrax missiles in our direction, he would have done so during the last dozen years, while American warplanes were pulverizing his military installations with weekly bombing raids. He'd certainly let us have it this week, now that Bush is revving up the war he wanted all along--but he won't, because he can't.



Furthermore, no one really believes that the GOP is interested in liberating the oppressed people of Iraq. America's role in the world, after all, typically involves funding dictators--as Bush is currently doing in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan---not democrats.



Like a befuddled chemistry lab student who works backwards from the answer in order to ensure the correct results, the Moron Majority have talked themselves into an excuse they can live with for a war they can't otherwise morally justify. Denial, after all, isn't just a river in Egypt.



By a two-to-one margin, Americans think that their country should adhere to its tradition of attacking other countries in self-defense only, never preemptively. Thirty-seven percent say that they support an invasion of Iraq only with UN approval. This war against Iraq fulfills neither of these conditions, so Americans have managed to morph Bush's insinuations about a Saddam-Al Qaeda link into full-on blame.



Sure, we're about to begin killing innocent men, women and children over in Iraq. It's not self-defense, so let's just call it "vengeance for 9-11." Does that work for you? Great. Osama's gotta be laughing like a hyena now that the heat's off.



There is some good news in all this. I know, "good" is a relative term if you're reading this in a bomb shelter under Baghdad or trapped at your work station under the rubble of an office building some Islamist wired and brought down on your head. But the war on Iraq is likely to lead to the political demise of the man whose evil and illegitimate rule currently represents the greatest threat to stability and peace in the world: George W. Bush.



Win or lose, Iraq will probably be Bush's Waterloo. Victory over Saddam's armed forces is a given; just as a company's announcement of previously-anticipated profits fails to deliver an uptick in stock price, military success is already assumed by the market of public opinion. That's why, even after it became evident that he'd be fighting this war alone (plus Tony Blair (news - web sites), minus the British public), Bush had to go ahead. His right-wing base, the part of the electorate that craves a belligerent president to protect it from future 9-11s, would have otherwise deserted him.



Even if Bush delivers a best-case scenario--quick defeat, minimal U.S. military and Iraqi civilian casualties--it won't do him any good. His supporters already expect that.



Things are most likely to go wrong when Bush can least afford it, during next year's campaign. Don't believe Kurdish promises to rejoin a federalized Iraq--they've had de facto independence for 12 years and they're not coming back. Turkey is already threatening to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, and they're leaning on their own Kurds. Hoping to neutralize its unruly neighbor, Iran is arming the Shiite majority. Civil war is more than likely, possibly leading to the disintegration of Turkey and an American excuse for an attack on Iran.



It's impossible to predict the effects of prolonged American occupation of an Arab country; increased terrorism, regional instability and even greater Muslim hostility to the U.S. and its allies seem likely. But a failure to establish a long-term U.S. military presence throughout the country could prove even more damaging than a quick pull-out. If Iraq follows Afghanistan (news - web sites) into neglect, political disintegration and anarchy, we'll be able to count our resentful new enemies by the tens of millions.



American alliances and relations with the UN and NATO (news - web sites) have been stretched to the breaking point. By launching an illegal, unsanctioned invasion of a sovereign nation, the U.S. has abandoned its moral standing. We are, by definition, a rogue state. More frightening than that, foreign leaders from Paris to Berlin to Beijing to Moscow are starting to count more on one another than on us. This means trouble for us, sure, but also for Bush as we notice our nation's loss of prestige.



As always, however, the fools will save us from themselves. The 51 percent who currently believe what is patently false will ultimately conclude that they were duped by Bush (though it's not really true). Like stupid Americans before them (those who bought into the Domino Theory, Joe McCarthy and the necessity of interning Japanese-Americans in concentration camps), they'll wonder what the hell they were thinking. And they'll have lots of time to think about it, what with not having a job and all.





Then they'll vote for an Unnamed Democrat, currently leading Bush 48 to 44 percent in the Quinnipiac poll released March 6.

(Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline and the motivations behind the war on terrorism. Ordering information is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.)