My good friend Mike sends this thing he wrote today. I think it expresses the anti-Gulf-War-Redux argument very effectively.
<Mike>
Let’s say you have some Joe GunDealer, a really mean and terrible guy, who has been put away in the past for dealing with guns and an assault with a gun. He’s out on probation, but almost continually gets hassled by the cops to search his car. He’s gotten so tired of the hassles and jail-time, he’s pretty much gotten rid of any trace of guns in his car… yet he still continuingly gets stopped by the cops. None the less, he lets the cops do whatever searching they want to do. Of course, he hates the fact that he has to do that… because it is HIS car, but he also knows he’ll get in a lot more trouble if he doesn’t let them search it. Now, the cops start to get mad cause they can’t find anything and they get into his face and scream at him “Why aren’t you helping me search your car for the guns I know you have!!!”. He explains to the cops that he never wanted his car searched in the first place, but he’s now begrudgingly trying to abide by the law, thus allowing the cops (who have a number of guns on themselves ) to do whatever they want. One of the cops starts complaining to him “I can’t find any guns. You, now, have to PROVE to me that you don’t have any guns in your car, or else your probation is over, and I’m going to take you back to the station to serve the rest of your time.”. He keeps trying to explain to the cop, “How can I prove that I DON’T have something in my car?? Are you saying I should still have empty shell casings or something in the car?? Dude… I destroyed it all. I got rid of it.”
While this is all happening, there’s this van (which was made in North Korea) that keeps going by the scene with the driver yelling things like “Dirty Pigs! You suck! I’m gonna kill you, one of these days!! You can’t catch me!!”. And the words “ILLEGAL ARM DEALER : We got the biggest guns you can buy!” are in big bold type on both sides of the van.
Beside this gun dealer’s stopped car, is this large Qaeda forest. And every once in a while, there are these guys in the woods who keep shooting at the cop cars. Every now and then, one of the cops will go after this guy in the woods. But another set of guys in the woods show up in their place and continues to shoot at the cop cars. All the while, these cops are continuing to focus on this completely unrelated incident of searching Joe GunDealer’s car.
Maybe later on, the cops do take Joe GunDealer away… and maybe they do a thorough search of his house (leaving his house a mess, BTW) and maybe they find some pistols and shotguns. However, during this whole time, half of their cop cars have been destroyed, and this crazy van guy has fired a couple of grenade launchers at the police station.
Now what was the sense of going after this Joe GunDealer, destroying his house in the process, when it didn’t help protect the cops or their police station???
And… if you want a more formal list of reasons not to go to war with Iraq, read this.
</Mike>
