If we now are embarked on a contemporary hundred years' war, what will
historians say was its
cause? Certainly 9/11 was the watershed event, but before that was the
founding of Israel in
1948 and before that, the carving up of the Ottoman Empire after World
War I. What separates
Bush from other world leaders who have tried to contain the centrifugal
forces of the Middle
East is not a lack of historical information or sound advice or allies
who seek the same goals.
It is his own distorted thinking, a trait that is personal and not
political, and has put the
United States on a path that runs through darkness.
Published on Sunday, August 27, 2006 by the Boulder Daily Camera
(Colorado)
Iraq: a War About Nothing by Marie Cocco
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0827-23.htm
WASHINGTON ‹ "Nothing." Rarely does a single word convey so much, and
explain so little.
The word leaped from President Bush's lips, dismissive and defiant, as
though the questioner
should have known better, and perhaps should not have asked. Bush at his
Monday news conference
made his customary recitation of all the new and supposedly improved
reasons why he went to war
against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, concluding that "the terrorists attacked
us and killed 3,000 of
our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East."
Then the question came ‹ bold and, frankly, beautiful. "What did Iraq
have to do with that?" The
president replied: "What did Iraq have to do with what?" Well, with the
9/11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"Nothing," was Bush's reply. Except that in his mind, the "lesson of
Sept. 11" is linked to
resentment and hopelessness that roil the hearts and minds of the people
of the Middle East,
nurturing suicide bombers.
And so because of this, Bush said, he invaded Iraq.
As the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, there is an aching
emptiness in repeating the
many untruths and odious insinuations that Bush and especially Vice
President ***** Cheney made
in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The totality of them was to convey
to the American people
the conclusion that Saddam somehow was behind the deadly attack, an
assault that was plotted and
executed from masterminds dwelling in Afghan camps.
The assertion has been disproved, disavowed, discredited ‹ pick your
word ‹ time and again by
the U.S. government, by foreign intelligence services, by the
independent 9/11 commission, and
by a growing list of authors who have accumulated a bulging portfolio of
evidence showing that
the Bush administration came into office in January 2001 already itching
to invade Iraq.
And so, to borrow the president's word, Sept.11 really did have
"nothing" to do with Iraq.
This is not an admission of error, but something more grave. It is an
exposition of the tragic
lack of logic that impairs the Bush administration and imperils the
country. The leaps of
imagination that Bush makes ‹ still ‹ between Sept. 11 and Saddam
Hussein are not entirely
political calculation, meant to confuse a bewildered nation about the
terrorist threat. The
president's mind and his policies are directed by this intuition. And so
is the nation.
As the anniversary approaches, we hear again some voices of reason and
some voices of passion,
from those who tried to penetrate the sophistry and bring some clarity
to the public. Tom Kean
and Lee Hamilton, co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission, describe in their
new book "Without
Precedent" the freakish political reaction to the panel's conclusion
that there were no
operational links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. After the president
publicly contradicted their
findings, and the vice president attacked the press for its account of
them, Kean found himself
at a news conference searching for the right words: The commission found
"there is no credible
evidence that we can discover, after a long investigation, that Iraq and
Saddam Hussein were in
any way part of the attack on the United States," he said.
Kristen Breitweiser, most prominent of the 9/11 widows who became known
as the Jersey Girls,
voted for Bush in 2000. Her late husband, Ron, idolized Cheney. But in
her new autobiography,
Breitweiser recounts the fear that overtook her while watching the 2004
Republican National
Convention. "I heard the expressions 'war for a lifetime' and '9/11'
repeated endlessly,"
Breitweiser writes in "Wake-Up Call." "I started thinking about Caroline
and her future. I
started getting scared about her safety. I didn't want to hand her a war
for the next hundred
years. That wasn't my job as a mom."
If we now are embarked on a contemporary hundred years' war, what will
historians say was its
cause? Certainly 9/11 was the watershed event, but before that was the
founding of Israel in
1948 and before that, the carving up of the Ottoman Empire after World
War I. What separates
Bush from other world leaders who have tried to contain the centrifugal
forces of the Middle
East is not a lack of historical information or sound advice or allies
who seek the same goals.
It is his own distorted thinking, a trait that is personal and not
political, and has put the
United States on a path that runs through darkness.
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| ~ Thaddeus Stevens ~ |
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--
"In the future you may be here, but will your dreams?"
.
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