Baghdad today: 81 Degrees, Widespread Dust
Last year, near this time, we learned that the war planning was crap.
Since then, there is a new book about how the media were so wrong for so long. In January, PublicIntegrity, a nonprofit, compiled a database of some 935 misleading or false statements on the road to war.
We've never found out just how much the massive search for WMD cost in Iraq (I believe that Chaney or Rumsfeld had part of the budget classified to shield the administration - let me know if they have been declassified, since). American led the biggest hunt for nothing ever orchestrated by mankind. Even Jason found the golden fleece and the fountain of youth never cost so dearly.
Without a hint of self-parody and with no mention of the cost of the massive undertaking, the DoD reports this week that it examined 600,000 Iraqi documents and found no indication that al-qa'ida was present in Iraq. After the sandstorm of looting and lawlessness, who even knew that there was an archive of 600K documents left? (In that context, November of 2003 appears to have been host to a disinformation campaign on the issue, yes?)
PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH
So, the medicine we are supposed to take from the militarists among the GOP is that weakness invites attack.
Well, did anyone stop to think that all the "America is #1" talk from the Reagan era finally came home to roost during the Bush-era, when we jettisoned the Powell doctrine (an articulated version of similar, prior constraints) in favor of "removing Saddam, because we can."?
In retrospect, this war was not a war of liberation, as some hoped it might be. It was Bush's war of arrogance, yes? We can act alone. We need only plan for success. Victory is assured.
Sometimes History's biggest truths turn out to be the same, old simple ones.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Scatology, Operation Iraqi Freedom
