Thursday, March 11, 2004
Are we big enough to let that shoe drop?
Approaching the one year anniversary of our nation's invasion of Iraq it's time to seriously begin asking questions about the story TeamBush told us about the origins of this war and how it would be playing out come March 2004.
Jonathan Schell, printed in Tom Englehardt's essential blog TomDispatch, recalls things much the way I do:
"By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes."
Sadly, as we all know, that's not turned out to be the case.
"Enough liberal whining, we're all better off with Saddam gone, the world and America are safer now," has been the typical Limbaugh/Hannity/Coulter response. Indeed, a still sizeable portion of the American electorate believes going into Iraq was the right thing for TeamBush to do, according to current polling.
I'm certain that Saddam was a despicable character, but I'm equally certain that he is only one of many such rogues out there today. In fact, as Schell details in his abovementioned article (dense but worth a read), some of those nuts pose a far bigger risk to US and even world stability than Saddam ever did.
So how did Saddam end up in our sights after 9-11? Again, history is slowly giving up its secrets, and each analysis points to the same basic conclusion: TeamBush settled on a game plan and then went about justifying it to themselves and the world. One of the more interesting 'insider' accounts of the run up to the Iraq War comes from Karen Kwiatkowski, whose article in Salon really is a must read--because she was there.
As a 20-year military lifer and longtime Penatgon staffer, she hardly fits the mold of the anti-war, pinko, vegan lefty trying to pin something on our patriotic president. Rather, appalled by the absolutely unprecedented pattern of deception, fabrication, and misinformation coming out of the Pentagon and its very politicized Office of Special Plans, she finally cashed out, took her pension, and is now telling all that she witnessed.
Regardless of how dubious one may have thought TeamBush's arguments were leading up to the invasion, this still makes for shocking, at times jaw-dropping reading.
Like any good military analyst, Kwiatkowski holds back her opinion over whether the invasion was morally right or wrong. Instead, she is horrified by the manner by which we got to this point. She noted:
"War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance for an honest debate."
And therein lies the rub--TeamBush had no intention of being honest to the American people about this huge undertaking they were asking us to shoulder, because honest debate might not have gone its way.
The initial cracks in TeamBush's fabled iron-discipline were first revealed by John DiIulio months before September 11, and in large measure confirmed and amplified by John Snow's recent best selling memoir. They are politicians first and policy makers a distant second. Hatch a plan, stick to it, and ram it through; no need to worry about how things will turn out as long as you win that day's vote or debate. Not just Iraq, but the Medicare "benefit" with the huge pricetag that helps no one but Big Pharma, like the shams of 'No Child Left Behind," and the Clean Skies Initiative and the Healthy Forest Initiative. That the crime against humanity that was September 11th helped TeamBush push some of their most outrageous schemes, such as ousting Saddam, was just icing on its cake.
So what I really need to know is, do we as Americans plan to hold them responsible? Not just for Iraq, but all of it?
The outcome is unclear, as the Magic Eight-Ball tells us. As a nation have we matured to the point where we can say that we were terribly mistaken and unconscionably misled, and radically change our course?
It's a very hard call. Especially with soldiers dying this very day in Iraq. Frankly, most countries haven't owed up to their mistakes and misdeeds, especially not ones at the height of their empire. I can't think of a single one. Did Britain give any mea culpa for its ill-fated Suez Canal occupation in 1956, let alone the Boer War?
The only nations that do admit mistakes on this scale are those beaten into crumpled, lifeless pulps, such as Nazi Germany after World War II. And even then, there remains a streak of humanity in Germans, and all of us, that wishes to deny the enormity of our mistakes, or clamours for a less-painful statute of limitations on shame and guilt.
Instead, like the French after World War II, we prefer to portray ourselves a nation of heroes, and bury down deep the memories of collaboration and co-optation.
Letting the shoe drop on this morally bankrupt Bush administration will be a good start for all of us.
Approaching the one year anniversary of our nation's invasion of Iraq it's time to seriously begin asking questions about the story TeamBush told us about the origins of this war and how it would be playing out come March 2004.
Jonathan Schell, printed in Tom Englehardt's essential blog TomDispatch, recalls things much the way I do:
"By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes."
Sadly, as we all know, that's not turned out to be the case.
"Enough liberal whining, we're all better off with Saddam gone, the world and America are safer now," has been the typical Limbaugh/Hannity/Coulter response. Indeed, a still sizeable portion of the American electorate believes going into Iraq was the right thing for TeamBush to do, according to current polling.
I'm certain that Saddam was a despicable character, but I'm equally certain that he is only one of many such rogues out there today. In fact, as Schell details in his abovementioned article (dense but worth a read), some of those nuts pose a far bigger risk to US and even world stability than Saddam ever did.
So how did Saddam end up in our sights after 9-11? Again, history is slowly giving up its secrets, and each analysis points to the same basic conclusion: TeamBush settled on a game plan and then went about justifying it to themselves and the world. One of the more interesting 'insider' accounts of the run up to the Iraq War comes from Karen Kwiatkowski, whose article in Salon really is a must read--because she was there.
As a 20-year military lifer and longtime Penatgon staffer, she hardly fits the mold of the anti-war, pinko, vegan lefty trying to pin something on our patriotic president. Rather, appalled by the absolutely unprecedented pattern of deception, fabrication, and misinformation coming out of the Pentagon and its very politicized Office of Special Plans, she finally cashed out, took her pension, and is now telling all that she witnessed.
Regardless of how dubious one may have thought TeamBush's arguments were leading up to the invasion, this still makes for shocking, at times jaw-dropping reading.
Like any good military analyst, Kwiatkowski holds back her opinion over whether the invasion was morally right or wrong. Instead, she is horrified by the manner by which we got to this point. She noted:
"War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance for an honest debate."
And therein lies the rub--TeamBush had no intention of being honest to the American people about this huge undertaking they were asking us to shoulder, because honest debate might not have gone its way.
The initial cracks in TeamBush's fabled iron-discipline were first revealed by John DiIulio months before September 11, and in large measure confirmed and amplified by John Snow's recent best selling memoir. They are politicians first and policy makers a distant second. Hatch a plan, stick to it, and ram it through; no need to worry about how things will turn out as long as you win that day's vote or debate. Not just Iraq, but the Medicare "benefit" with the huge pricetag that helps no one but Big Pharma, like the shams of 'No Child Left Behind," and the Clean Skies Initiative and the Healthy Forest Initiative. That the crime against humanity that was September 11th helped TeamBush push some of their most outrageous schemes, such as ousting Saddam, was just icing on its cake.
So what I really need to know is, do we as Americans plan to hold them responsible? Not just for Iraq, but all of it?
The outcome is unclear, as the Magic Eight-Ball tells us. As a nation have we matured to the point where we can say that we were terribly mistaken and unconscionably misled, and radically change our course?
It's a very hard call. Especially with soldiers dying this very day in Iraq. Frankly, most countries haven't owed up to their mistakes and misdeeds, especially not ones at the height of their empire. I can't think of a single one. Did Britain give any mea culpa for its ill-fated Suez Canal occupation in 1956, let alone the Boer War?
The only nations that do admit mistakes on this scale are those beaten into crumpled, lifeless pulps, such as Nazi Germany after World War II. And even then, there remains a streak of humanity in Germans, and all of us, that wishes to deny the enormity of our mistakes, or clamours for a less-painful statute of limitations on shame and guilt.
Instead, like the French after World War II, we prefer to portray ourselves a nation of heroes, and bury down deep the memories of collaboration and co-optation.
Letting the shoe drop on this morally bankrupt Bush administration will be a good start for all of us.
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