I Don' Need No Stinkin' Passport

Aaagghh!! I can’t stand to listen to these lie anymore! You may already be aware of my general stance as regards Homeland (Fatherland, Motherland, whatever. Insert appropriate proto-fascist term of Teutonic etymology.) Security. It’s all false! A neo-con red herring which seeks to turn our attention away from the Administration’s true agenda, which is to turn the social clock back to a mythic time when women baked merrily in the kitchen while cheerily giving over their sons to the great god of War. The war on terror? Phhhht! Simply an excuse to keep the American people in a state of perpetual anxiety so they will gladly surrender those freedoms our fathers fought and died for in real wars. We’re told that this is a different kind of war. Hah! All I see is pictures of tanks and troops in flak jackets. Looks pretty much like the old kind of war to me! If the administration was serious about conducting a genuine war on terror the American people wouldn’t even be aware of it. You don’t need military divisions to decapitate terrorist groups. And that old saw, “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.” How many battle groups do terrorists have poised off our shores preparing to land their overwhelming numbers on Miami Beach? Pah! The war on terror? A shadow play!

But what is real is yet another assault on our freedom of movement, fed to us as yet one more measure necessary to our security. There was a time when I expected to have to show a passport in order to enter some other benighted nation-state, whose tenuous claim to sovereignty was often merely an insistence on bureaucratic officiousness. To me it was often a matter of a little pride that Americans were more confident in their nationality, and did not demand this extra little humiliation of their own people. Now the phony war serves as the pretext for this wholly misguided policy. I have to produce a passport to prove I can return to my country of birth! No matter where I embarked! It’s enough to make one want to move to a more civilized milieu. Like France.

And can anyone really believe that such a policy will serve to increase the security of the American people? Sheesh! First of all, all the terrorists involved in bombing of the WTC were in possession of valid passports. They even bore admission stamps placed in them by U.S. immigration officers! Second, any terrorists of any degree of competence will be in possession of either false passports of such quality as to readily confound border security, or actual American passports sold to them by corrupt officials. These guys don’t just meet up over beers in Amsterdam and decide to take out the Holland Tunnel because there’s nothing shakin’ over the weekend. They put some planning into their acts of carnage. Demanding passports from Flo in Wichita and Ed in Bangor will not frustrate the terrorists’ designs. The only thing this new passport policy insures is an increase in the number counterfeit passports and unnecessary bureaucratic delays.

But I go on.

Oh! And the war in Iraq? Let’s get out! Yes. Now! Are we going to have to prolong the agony, as we did in Vietnam? Pull a Nixon! Declare victory and board the planes with bands blaring. Dubya himself said years ago “Mission Accomplished.” Okay, then. That’s the end of it. What the Iraqi people do now is up to them. We may not like the outcome, but that’s always a chance one takes when one chooses to make war. No one who continues to support that messy affair can define a victory which wouldn’t require an open-ended commitment to an ever-increasing number of American lives. When will there be a stable, free and independent Iraq? Hah! When there is peace in the Middle East.

This much I know: As long as there are armies on the ground over there, there will be no peace.