“Bye, Bye International Guy” Performed by John Forbes Kerry
(Sung to the tune of “American Pie” by Don McLean)

A long, long time ago,
I can still remember
How Vietnam used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance,
I could hold those folks in a trance
And they’d be fooled by my Northeastern smile

But November will make me shiver,
With every red state he delivers
Bad news for my campaign,
Can my ego take such pain?

Ted Kennedy just sat and cried
No one believed the President lied
As my S.U.V. sat outside
The day my campaign died

*Chorus*

So bye, bye international guy
Appeared feeble to the people, and the people decide
And those foreign boys scratch their heads and sigh
Singing, “How did the Kerry campaign die?”
“How did the Kerry campaign die?”

Why does George Bush speak of love?
And what’s with his talk of God above,
Church and state are a no-no
Now, do you believe in equal rights
The state can take this to new heights
The teachings of the Church have grown too old

Well, you gotta know that Bush is dim
The English language is hard for him
The man ain’t got a clue
I was a better one to choose

I was a real tough swift boat Navy stud
With war experience and a wound in my butt
Thirty years in D.C. ain’t enough
To say why the campaign died

I started singing

*Chorus*

Now for ten years Congress has been owned,
By Republicans with little homes
But that’s not how it used to be
When Ronnie and Nancy were King and Queen
It was a very different scene
Policy filtered through folks like me

And while King George’s polls were down,
Bill Clinton won our rightful crown
But Congress soon would churn,
The Gingrage wing returned

And while Clinton practiced oral arts,
Revolution began to start
I knew this crap could play a part
Causing my campaign to die

So I’m singing

*Chorus*

Geezie Peezie, spring time made me sleepy
The primary proved I could be sneaky
But the polls are falling fast
The pollsters can kiss my @ss
I even tried to burn Bush on gas
But I know this gas crisis will never last

Now, Bush has gone and F’d up Iraq
Yet America keeps smoking crack
An opening to advance
Oh, but we never got the chance
The Republican Attack Machine
All used tactics that were real mean
They were pivotal; I concede
They made my campaign die

They started singing

*Chorus*

Now, there is no more time to save face
This politician lost the race
With no side left to legislate
So come on George be honest,
George be true
George Bush lied to both me and you
That’s how he and Dick stole Florida state

Oh, and as I watched him fly that plane
That draft dodger drove me insane
No Air National Guard
Could polish my bronze star

And as that banner raised into the sky
‘Mission Accomplished’ fed the lie
But most Americans aren’t that bright
That’s why my campaign died

Now I’m singing

*Chorus*

I had a job that paid some dough
But Theresa owns my life, you know
Besides, she took my nads away
I went down to Capital Hill
Where I felt I could get richer still
Now the public will not let me play

And in the streets the homeless drank
A boy’s dream of raising taxes sank
If only I had spoken
These damn church bells’d be broken

And the three things I admire most
The power, dough and the need to boast
A half wit turned them all to toast
The day my campaign died

So I’m still singing

Bye, bye international guy
Appeared feeble to the people, and the people decide
And those foreign boys scratch their heads and sigh
Singing, “How did the Kerry campaign die?”
“How did the Kerry campaign die?”

We’re all singin’

Bye, bye international guy
Appeared feeble to the people, and the people decide
And those foreign boys scratch their heads and sigh
Singing, Thank God, the Kerry campaign died...

* A failure to detect that preparations were under way for a guerrilla war in the event that Baghdad fell.

* A failure to quickly recognize that a guerrilla war was under way in Iraq, and a delay of months before the reality was recognized and a strategy developed for dealing with it.

* A failure to understand that the United States did not have the resources to govern Iraq if all Baathist personnel were excluded.

* A failure to understand the nature of the people the United States was installing in the Iraqi Governing Council -- and in particular, the complex loyalties of Ahmed Chalabi and his relationship to Iraq’s Shia and the Iranian government. The United States became highly dependent on individuals about whom it lacked sufficient intelligence.

* A failure to recognize that the Sunni guerrillas were regrouping in February and March 2004, after their defeat in the Ramadan offensive.

* Completely underestimating the number of forces needed for the occupation of Iraq, and cavalierly dismissing accurate Army estimates in favor of lower estimates that rapidly became unsupportable.

* Failing to step up military recruiting in order to increase the total number of U.S. ground forces available on a worldwide basis. Failing to understand that the difference between defeating an army and occupying a country had to be made up with ground forces.

* Failing to focus on the objective. Rather than remembering why U.S. forces were in Iraq and focusing on that, the Bush administration wandered off into irrelevancies and impossibilities, such as building democracy and eliminating Baath party members. The administration forgot its mission.

* Underestimating the enemy and overestimating U.S. power. The enemy was intelligent, dedicated and brave. He was defending his country and his home. The United States was enormously powerful but not omnipotent. The casual dismissal of the Iraqi guerrillas led directly to the failure to anticipate and counter enemy action.

* Failure to rapidly identify errors and rectify them through changes of plans, strategies and personnel. Error is common in war. The measure of a military force is how honestly errors are addressed and rectified. When a command structure begins denying that self- evident problems are facing them, all is lost. The administration’s insistence over the past year that no fundamental errors were committed in Iraq has been a cancer eating through all layers of the command structure -- from the squad to the office of the president.

* Failing to understand the political dimension of the war and permitting political support for the war in the United States to erode by failing to express a clear, coherent war plan on the broadest level. Because of this failure, other major failures -- ranging from the failure to find weapons of mass destruction to the treatment of Iraqi prisoners -- have filled the space that strategy should have occupied. The persistent failure of the president to explain the linkage between Iraq and the broader war has been symptomatic of this systemic failure.

You say that people are entering Iraq from Syria, and you know who they are or have caught some of them. What are their names? What passports do they have? Are they Syrians? Are their [passports] forged? Give us some of the names, tell us how they entered, interrogate them.’ So far, we have received no information. I told [the Americans]: ’Give us one piece of information. After all, we are talking about infiltration.’ People are crossing the Syrian border, and we do not know. This [i.e. weapons smuggling and infiltration of people] interests us as a state. Anything that happens [in this regard] without our knowledge is illegal activity, and we have to be notified about it. Up until now, [we have received] no information
 The accusations toward us are merely throwing on us the responsibility for other countries’ failures.

The U.S. has changed from an element of stability to an element of instability
 There is confusion connected to the fact that the administration has failed at solving some of its problems, primarily Iraq.

We support an active role for Europe, but it is obvious that Europe has no active tools right now.....The reality is of American hegemony toward the European decision, and of European surrender to the American decision,

"I do not believe in the idea of the clash of civilizations. There are no civilizations... The most common problem for the Syrian citizen is making a living." Most Arab citizens are stricken with confusion and despair as a result of the situation. The Arab leaders bear a large part of the responsibility, and this is natural. The problem is not whether we despair, but whether we give in to despair

The death of Nicholas Berg is a horror. It is a bitter, brutal reminder of why we are at war -- something that much of America’s political and media elite, in their binge of outrage and apology over the Abu Ghraib abuses, have lately seemed all too willing to forget.

I don’t for a moment minimize the awfulness of what some American soldiers did to their Iraqi captives in that prison. Their offenses may have fallen far short of the savagery that Abu Ghraib was notorious for under Saddam Hussein, but in their cruelty and urge to humiliate, and in the sadistic glee with which they posed for those obscene photographs, they reek of the depravity we went to Iraq to uproot. As one who believes that this war was necessary above all on moral grounds, I’m sickened by what they did.

But I’m sickened as well by the relish with which this scandal is being exploited by those who think the defeat of the Bush administration is an end that justifies just about any means. I’m sickened by the recklessness of the media, which relentlessly flogged the graphic images from Abu Ghraib, giving them an in-your-face prominence that couldn’t help but exaggerate their impact. And I’m sickened by the thought of how much damage this feeding frenzy may have done to the war effort.

We do remember the war effort, don’t we? Surely we haven’t forgotten the jetliners smashing into the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and 3,000 innocents dying in a single morning. Or the monstrous Saddam, who filled mass graves to bursting, invaded two neighboring countries, and avidly sought weapons of mass destruction. Or the reason why 130,000 US soldiers are on the line in Iraq: because establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East is critical to cutting off the terrorists’ oxygen -- the backing of dictatorial regimes.

My sense is that the public *hasn’t*lost sight of any of this. But for weeks now, a goodly swath of the chattering class has been treating the war as little more than a rhetorical backdrop against which to score political points or increase market share.

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, for instance, reacted to the Abu Ghraib revelations with a column urging the Democratic presidential candidate to milk the moment for all it was worth. "If ever there was a moment for John Kerry to come out swinging, this is it," she wrote. "It is the biggest story of the war, and he is essentially silent." There are many thoughtful things one might say about Abu Ghraib, but only someone eager for the US campaign in Iraq to fail and George W. Bush to be defeated could possibly describe it as "the biggest story of the war."

In any case, the Kerry campaign has hardly been silent on the prison scandal. It is using it as a fundraising hook, sending out mass e-mails urging supporters to petition for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation -- and to donate money to the Kerry campaign.

Poor Nick Berg. The anybody-but-Bush crowd isn’t going to rush to publicize his terrible fate with anything like the zeal it brought to the abused-prisoners story. CBS and the New Yorker couldn’t resist the temptation to shove the Abu Ghraib photos into the public domain -- and the rest of the media then made sure the world saw them over and over and over. But when it comes to video and stills of Al Qaeda murderers severing Berg’s head with a knife and brandishing it in triumph for the camera, the Fourth Estate is suddenly squeamish.

As I write on Wednesday afternoon, the CBS News web site continues to offer a complete "photo essay" of naked Iraqi men being humiliated by Americans in a variety of poses. But the video of Berg’s beheading, CBS says, "is too gruesome to show." No other network and no newspaper that I have seen shows the gory pictures, either.

What exactly is the governing rule here? That incendiary images sure to enrage our enemies and get more Americans killed should be published, while images that show the world just how evil those enemies really are should be suppressed? Offensive and shocking pictures that undermine the war effort should be played up, but offensive and shocking pictures that remind us why we’re at war in the first place shouldn’t get played at all?

Yes, Virginia, there really is a gaping media double standard. News organizations will shield your tender eyes from the sight of a Berg or a Daniel Pearl being decapitated or of Sept. 11 victims jumping to their deaths, or of the mangled bodies on the USS Cole, or of Fallujans joyfully mutilating the remains of four lynched US civilians. But they will make sure you don’t miss the odious behavior of Americans or American allies, no matter how atypical that misbehavior may be, or how determined the US military is to uproot and punish it.

We are at war with a vicious enemy, and propaganda in wartime is a weapon whose consequences can be deadly. Nick Berg lost his life because the Abu Ghraib pictures were turned into a worldwide media event. Yes, those who did it were sheltered by the First Amendment. That makes their actions not better, but worse.