- Quit his anchor job over a bad story call? I think Dan
would rather not. But he did.
-
- Quit his job over a war launched by a fiction? It wouldn't
cross Dubya's mind. And he won't.
-
- Accountability in journalism, none in the barnyards of
power.
-
- This week even the looniest of neo-cons and chicken hawks
that surround this bellicose president finally gave up on the weapons of
mass destruction whopper that has cost thousands upon thousands of people
their lives in the Iraq war and the blood-drenched occupation that has
followed.
-
- Given the enormity of the deception and the crushing
losses, one would have expected at the very least to get the word from
some lo-level flunky at the White House. But the Bush administration didn't
even bother to tell its own citizens that the 1,200 members of the Iraq
Survey Group minus the 12 who have been killed on the job, had been permanently
off the job since before Christmas.
-
- News that the hunt was over for chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons in Iraq came instead from stories printed in the Washington
Post. Right to the end, the CIA ran true to form, refusing to authorize
any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record. As
for the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered on trying to save Bush's
bacon on WMD, the Pentagon says there will be no public accounting. The
old story; nothing is more classified than government fiascoes.
-
- So what now does the record look like? First, the U.S.
and Britain invaded a sovereign nation without provocation and without
cause. Like it or lump it, that's the skinny. It turns out that Hans Blix,
Scott Ritter, David Kaye, Charles Duelfer and most of the world had it
right; war in Iraq was not a policy of last resort but an unjustified aggression
measured against the only thing that counts -- its own stated rationale.
-
- Second, all of the foundational pre-war statements by
President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
have been refuted: No WMD, no reconstituted nuclear program, no al-Qaida
link, and no adoring Iraqi crowds festooning U.S. tanks with flowers.
-
- Third, the casualties have been horrific. More than 100,000
Iraqi soldiers and civilians have been killed, and nearly 1,400 U.S. troops
sent by their president to "disarm" a country of weapons it did
not possess. Thousands of others, the forgotten people on both sides, have
been maimed for life -- all in the name of something that wasn't true.
-
- Fourth, the Bush administration has sanctioned tactics
in Iraq that have nothing to do with American principles, either legal
or moral. Abu Ghraib wasn't the brainchild of the sadistic night shift
behind those sick walls. It was, as we are learning from the first trials
of U.S. military personnel, the direct result of orders given by intelligence
officers working within the barbarous parameters drawn for them by their
own president and his secretary of defense.
-
- It was President Bush who proclaimed that Iraqi prisoners
were not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention and it was
Donald Rumsfeld who took the president's fuzzy edict to the operational
level in Iraq and Guantanamo. Attack dogs, beatings, nudity, sexual abuse,
religious outrages and indefinite jailing without charge, how sharply all
of this has defined America for the very people it is trying to win over
in Iraq.
-
- The Big Lie has now morphed into the Even Bigger Lie,
the great democratic leap forward that Iraq is supposed to be taking in
a few weeks. The Bush administration is touting this month's elections
as the turning point for the "new" Iraq. Outgoing Secretary of
State Colin Powell is even hinting that U.S. troops start coming home as
early as this year if things go well.
-
- With invaders' guns supporting a puppet government, there
can be no such thing as free elections. Last time I looked, Iraq was under
a state of martial law, Fallujah had been razed to the ground to break
an insurgency that is getting stronger not weaker, and at least half the
country will not be able to vote for fear of their lives in four of Iraq's
most populous provinces. Shiite will be pitted against Sunni as soon as
the forgone conclusion of this empty exercise emerges -- a government that
looks a lot like the one that Iraq's former American governor, Paul Bremer,
put in place before he left the country.
-
- As for the man who inspired the war on terror, Osama
Bin Laden is unaccountably still at large, presumably in the mountainous
regions of Pakistan. Instead of pursuing the culprit of 9/11, the overwhelming
weight of U.S. force is being squandered in Iraq for reasons other than
the ones stated, while it is left to Pakistan to deal with Islam's Holy
Terror.
-
- Has this strategy made the world, let alone the U.S.,
safer? Not according to the man left in charge of hunting down al-Qaida's
elusive leader. Pakistan's answer to the shah of Iran, General Pervez Musharef,
recently gave an interview in which he said that the war on terror had
in fact made the world more dangerous. What was needed, he said, was an
attack on the root causes of terrorism, not blunt force, a powerful indictment
coming from America's staunchest ally in its perpetual war in the shadows.
-
- But Americans continue to snooze in front of the strange
news that their president had it dead wrong, treating this week's revelation
that there were and are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq like an
unexpected upset in a college football game. At last count, 52% think Dubya's
doing a swell job.
-
- Dan Rather had not only to eat his words, he had to choke
on them. George Bush merely produced a new mantra, whose retroactivity
doesn't seem to bother a red-white-and-blue soul south of the border.
-
- Reflexive patriotism is such a soothing substitute for
the truth.
-
- http://www.canoe.ca/
|
