Fighting back for freedom
In the early months of this year, the man in the white house and those working for him went before the American people and United Nations and stated, in no uncertain terms, that there was no doubt that the government of Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraqi government posed an immediate threat, a clear and present danger, to the world and, specifically, the United States. That was the justification for the war in Iraq. The war is over, the fighting has ended, and no weapons have been found.
It's late tonight, but tomorrow I will talk about the implications of all this is.
There are a lot of arguments to be made that their never was a threat to this country from Iraq, that, contrary to what we were unequivicably assured of before the war, Iraq posed no threat to this country, no threat to its neighbors, no threat to the world. We have produced no weapons of mass destruction, no evidence of there having recently been weapons of mass destruction, and no evidence that Iraq had a program of recent vintage dedicated to creating weapons of mass destruction. Stephen Cambone, one of Bush's stooges assures us that the evidence will come to light, that eventually there will be proof that Iraq had such a program. But here's the thing. Nobody denies that Iraq once had such a program. We saw there weapons in action agains Iran, against the Kurds. That wasn't the resason we went to war, though. We went to war because the President convinced Congress and the American people that we were threatened.
So now, anybody who still cares and doesn't have a vested interest in believing otherwise, anybody who didn't stake his or her reputation on Iraq'a possession of these weapons (this excludes the entire right-wing press cohort)has to face the fact that we were mislead. And that should be worrisome, because there are really only two explanations for that, and they are both ugly.
The first explanation is that just 18 months after 9/11, we were once again victimized by a spectacular failure on the part of the American intelligence community. I don't think that we need to expend too much energy on this fear, though. By all indications, a significant portion of that community, notably the CIA (my gosh, I never thought I would be defending the CIA), didn't believe that Iraq had these weapons either. In fact, it was primarily a small cadre of right wing think tank rejects working out of the white house who produced the "intelligence" that Iraq was armed and dangerous. Who provided the arguments for Bush to take to the public and Congress to justify the war.
And what was the evidence? Remember this year's State of the Union address, when Bush said there was evidence that Iraq was seeking to buy material to build nuclear weapons from an African country? The CIA had seen that "evidence" last fall and pronounced it questionable. It fit with what Bush wanted us to believe, however, so he cited it. Later it turned out that the documents were crude forgeries. Next we moved on to Colin Powell's dog and pony show at the U.N. You remember the pictures; in one a truck was there, in the next the truck was gone: proof that those Iraqi's were up to something. (Those sneaky Iraqi's, using mobile trucks.) The aluminum tubes for missile launchers. The unmanned drones that could reach Europe. During the war, did we see any of these things in action? Since the war, have we seen any evidence of them? Of course not. They were part of a weapons program that didn't exist.
I'm not saying that Saddam didn't want to have such a weapon's program. The thing is, by all indications, the inspections were working. What with manned and unmanned fly-overs and on the ground inspections, he couldn't develop his weapons. Our fearless leader ridiculed much of the rest of the world, as well as a significant portion of his own nation, for believing in an inspection program that actually was keeping weapons out of Saddam's hands.
What's worse is, Bush and his gang of thieves knew this. They knew Saddam wasn't deadly. If you really thought Saddam was a madman and that he had these weapons, would you risk attacking him and giving him a reason and an opportunity to use them? Would you concentrate a quarter million troops just across the border from this madman for several months, giving him an opportunity to very effectively use those weapons? Saddam knew we were coming, we kept telling him so. He had to know by the time of the 72 hour deadline that we were coming. And yet he held his fire. He held his fire because he had nothing to shoot. And Bush knew this. And Bush lied to us.
And this is what amazes me. We live in a country that a few short years ago impeached a President for lying about having an extra-marital affair and yet now, post 9/11, very few seem to care about a man in the White House who lies about the reason he wants to send his country off to war. How have we come to this?
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