Iraqi Civil War Means We've Failed To Learn Axl Rose's Lesson
Military commanders as well as journalists say they're seeing an upsurge in sectarian violence; meanwhile, ethnic factions are playing more hardball than ever before in the months-old negotiations to form a new Iraqi government. President Bush is getting low ratings at home on his handling of Iraq, and the Iraqi people are dealing with still more bloodshed and tragedy. The situation is so dire that the media is now trying to decide whether to call the situation "civil war."
It doesn't take a skilled political analyst to know that an Iraqi civil war would be a disaster. In addition to the untold human misery and destruction, a true civil war would repudiate a part of American foreign policy that's kept us in good stead since the early 1990's. I'm speaking, of course, about the lyrics to the Guns 'n' Roses song "Civil War,"Â? which eloquently outlines America's foreign policy goals regarding civil disorder in strategically important areas like the Middle East.
Axl Rose was looking far, far into the geopolitical future when he sang "your power hungry sellin' soldiers / in a human grocery store."Â? While some saw it as a polemic against greed and violence, he was actually outlining a post-civil war Iraq, in which society is so far broken down that people sell each other in human grocery stores. It's believed (though not certain) that such stores would probably count on a high markup and on selling bodies weeks past their expiration dates. There would probably also be rooms full of potatoes, which militias would use to hypnotize prisoners (that's what "bloody hands of the hypnotized" probably means). The supply of potatoes having gone to military use rather than for food, the price of potato soup would skyrocket in Iraq, leading to further chaos.
We know now, thanks to Bob Woodward's book "Appetite for Destruction: George Bush and the Rose Doctrine," that Colin Powell presented a copy of the Use Your Illusion CD's to President Bush in the weeks leading up to the war. But did he listen to them, or at least leaf through the liner notes on a slow day at the Oval Office? Or did Dick Cheney, always skeptical of what he called "Axl Rose's hippie fantasies," switch the CD to something more hawkish, like Slayer? Or did the CD player skip too much, causing the President to switch back to his collection of Allman Brothers live tapes? The man doesn't have time for CD's to skip, folks! He's got work to do!
While we could speculate here for weeks, the point still stands, unlike Sasha Cohen. If an Iraqi civil war comes about, it's because the world failed to heed the words of Axl Rose, to its own peril. We can't afford to sell soldiers in a human grocery store. We can't afford to carry the cross of homicide, or let history hide the lies of our civil wars. What's so civil 'bout war, anyway? Right, Axl?
