Duped

"Our nation is the greatest force for good in history."
-President George W. Bush,
Crawford, Texas, August 31, 2002

My grandpa had a birthday on Friday, so I gave him a call (after a little parental prodding). I've unfortunately never been very close to my grandparents, so conversations usually consist of "how's the weather," "how's school," and "do you have a boyfriend/where are my great-grandkids" (okay, maybe not that far). And if I'm talking to the WWII vet grandpa, then I hear about Camp Pendleton and his travels in Asia.

Our usual fluffy conversation took a turn yesterday when he said something about Hitler and Hirohito and their being bent on world domination. Having just finished a book about U.S. militarism and imperialism, I remarked that we were seeing a similar situation today with the war. He took that as a reference to Saddam, not Bush, and he told me "honey, you've got your countries mixed up" when I brought up U.S. sanctions on Iraq to point out some of what the U.S. has done to earn its current reputation. It all became eerily familiar when he said the U.S. was just "trying to help Iraqis find freedom," but that they didn't want or understand freedom, and had their heads in the sand. I tried to explain that democracy can't be imposed, and that there has to be cultural sensitivity, but he seemed to have a pretty narrow view of the Muslim world, that it was backwards and that Americans were smarter because they didn't kill their own people (Oklahoma city? Civil War?).

It was needless to say a pretty exasperating conversation. He's a very liberal guy, and he doesn't trust Bush, so I was pretty shocked and disappointed to hear him spit back the right's rhetoric. The thing is, he was projecting the WWII view of the world onto what's going on today (in the same way that Bush and Rice are taking a Cold War era view). During WWII, the U.S. was justified in taking action, and it was a noble fight. My grandpa's generation deserves to be honored for that. What's going on today in Iraq is illegitimate and is in no way the same battle, and that's something that's misunderstood.