Just more of my rantings 

Just more of my rantings

It seems to me that one of the things that is preventing we as a nation from having a meaningful dialogue about Iraq, about the initial phase of the war there, the justification for the war and the continuing problems in establishing some kind of civil order, is the continuing refusal of the administration and its apologists in the press to admit that the prime justifications advanced for the war last fall and winter just weren't true, that the initial estimates for how we would be greeted by the Iraqis themselves were far from accurate, and that the pacification of those remaining belligerents and the reconstruction of the infrastructure and Iraqi society is also messier, slower, bloodier, and more expensive than was anticipated. Leaving aside for the moment that those who "planned" this war and occupation were either spectacularly incompetent or dishonest (or some combination of the two) in the manner in which they sold this adventure to Congress and the American people and tried to sell it to the world, it is absolutely stunning, and in a perverse way impressive, how they continually manage to ignore or, at best twist (and this is wierd too, how twisting the truth comes out as a better alternative than outright ignoring it) the truth so as to continue with the fantasy that everyting has worked and is continuing to work exactly as we planned it. So, we find our President proclaiming Iraq as the central battle in the "war on terror," which through his own machinations it has in fact become. The administration has outright failed to establish that any recent or relevant connection existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda or 9/11 before the war was launched. The proclamations coming from the administration last fall that there was evidence going back ten years to link Iraq and Al Qaeda are perhaps the best illustration of just how these people work to twist the truth. The implication from these statements and the way they were framed was that starting ten years ago and continuing to the present there were connections between the two. In fact, the evidence they had was that there were meetings ten years ago, and none since.

Anyway, with this continuing disconnect between what the administration says is true and what is in fact clearly true, and different from what they say is true, it is impossible for any body outside of the administration, or at least outside of its mindset, to engage them in debate or dialog. If they continue to insist that a cloudy sky is a blue sky then we can't discuss the implications of the cloudy sky.