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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (124558)	2/9/2004 10:45:55 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

The lies that bind White House team to Iraq thestar.com By ROBERT SCHEER SPECIAL TO THE STAR Feb. 8, 2004. 01:00 AM The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right and from the secular to the religious. It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists and on through the suicide bombers of today. Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President George W. Bush in justifying his pre-emptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush — misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations — are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago. Once again, we seem unwilling to fully grasp the lesson of Vietnam, our other major exercise in pre-emptive war based on the theories of ivory-tower intellectuals with dreams of a Pax Americana. For those requiring a refresher course in that previous folly, which so fractured our country while devastating three others, check out filmmaker Errol Morris' new documentary, The Fog Of War, in which the Vietnam adventure's prime architect, Robert S. McNamara, tearfully concedes it was all a grand mistake. That decade-long conflict was brought to you originally by Democrats, one of whom, John F. Kennedy, remains much admired. McNamara attempts to make the case that JFK wanted to get out but was assassinated before that could happen, but I don't buy that theory. Getting out is the hardest part, particularly once you have put abroad the lie that you invaded a country in order to save it. It is political suicide to abandon such a crusading war when it turns sour. Today, we again have been battered senseless by the argument that it is "irresponsible" to leave Iraq, even when it is clear we are no longer welcome. Those who dare suggest that our continued presence as an occupier is actually part of the problem — like Democratic presidential contender Dennis Kucinich — are pilloried as unrealistic. But attempting to alter other people's history — while also serving our own economic and political needs — leads almost inevitably to quagmire, blowback and a nonsensical path of trying to make future truth of past lies: We didn't go to Iraq to save it, but now we have to save it to excuse the fact that we went. This tangled web is no less onerous when spun by Republicans Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney than by Democrats Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. And now, as then, in the early stages of the war, we saw only the most tepid opposition from the political and media elites to the big-lie technique that so often accompanies war. Most of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, for example, are compromised by having supported an invasion they should have passionately challenged before it was launched. It is not too late for them to admit Bush fooled them, as some of them have begun to do. Thankfully, the campaign of Senator Joe Lieberman is finished. He consistently endorsed the White House's cynical abuse of the facts, recently saying the Iraq invasion was "just" because "Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction," a stupid and dangerous twisting of language. Similarly unnerving is the ease with which ideologues like Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz manage to shape and shift their arguments whenever their grand theories are undermined by messy reality. "We have a more important job to do in Iraq ... and that is to help the Iraqi people build a free and democratic country," Wolfowitz said last weekend. If this was the goal all along, why didn't Wolfowitz and Bush tell the American people before they sacrificed their sons and daughters to the crusade? What was all that about the imminent threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's ties to 9/11? All lies, it turns out. If Wolfowitz ever finds his conscience, as McNamara apparently did, he too will be crying in some future documentary about the folly of presuming to bring enlightenment to a people we neither respected nor understood, while undermining our own fragile democracy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Scheer is a syndicated columnist who regularly appears in the Los Angeles Times.

To: Bilow who wrote (124558)	2/9/2004 10:54:03 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Ya sure, the perfumed princes of the Pentagon cry to reporters, if only Rumsfeld had listened to us, everything would have been perfect! Riiiiight. Meantime, the Americans just intercepted a memo from Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to some Al Qaeda honcho in Iran, and he doesn't sound half so sanguine about his situation as you do. In fact: The memo says extremists are failing to enlist support inside the country, and have been unable to scare the Americans into leaving. It even laments Iraq's lack of mountains in which to take refuge. Yet mounting an attack on Iraq's Shiite majority could rescue the movement, according to the document. The aim, the document contends, is to prompt a counterattack against the Arab Sunni minority ... With some exasperation, the author writes: "We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. "By God, this is suffocation!" the writer says. Message 19785944