The War in Iraq: Who is really to Blame?

This week’s McLaughlin Group reported a new poll showing that 62 percent of Americans think the War in Iraq was a mistake. That’s right – 62 percent! This week’s poll is a complete turn from the October 2002 Pew Research Center report. In that report 62 percent of Americans supported going to war. Apparently, as the war drags on, more people are paying attention to the errors and lies of both the administration and the press.
Now let’s do some quick math. I will first make an assumption: “Nobody who did not support the war in 2002, suddenly does now.” While, I guess it is possible that my assumption is wrong, I guarantee that if I am the numbers will not change outside of the margin of error, and therefore, is still statistically – if not universally – correct. Thus if 62% supported the war in 2002, 38% did not. Now 38% support the war and 62% do not. That means 24% of Americans have changed their mind. It is to you 24% that I speak.
While normally I am glad that people have turned around to my way of thinking. Today I am angry. Why did it take the 3700 American deaths and 73,000 Iraqi deaths for 24% of Americans to do their job as members of a democracy? That is 72,000,000 of you who completely disregarded rational thought or any semblance of duty to your country and the world.
The decision to go to war was made in the court of public opinion. The administration was the prosecutors. The witnesses were drawn from the intelligence community and the media. I and my ilk (you know “surrender monkeys,” “Saddam lovers” and “People who forgot about September 11”) were the defense counsel. And, the American public was the jury. And, it was you 24% of Americans who pushed the vote over to conviction.
For purposes of this piece I will ignore evidence that has come out since the war started. I will not discuss yellow cake and Valerie Plame, or the fact that not one ounce of the supposed 100-500 TONS of WMD has been recovered. Nor shall I discuss the findings that the aluminum tube controversy was a farce. Instead, I shall look to the evidence and counter eveidence that was readily available in March 2003. There are four key factors that you ignored when convicting.
The first is the definitiveness of WMD. In October 2002, the CIA released a declassified report to make the case for the War in Iraq. In the report there were so many “probablys” and “likelys” that made it seem that we did not know enough. Since then George Tenet has said intelligence is not meant to stand up in a court of law. Well, fine but if you are going to use it as a causi bellum and send in 150,000 American troops to kill 70,000 Iraqis it had better!
So, did you even bother to look at this report? A friend of mine said that not everybody is as politically interested as me and wouldn’t read the CIA report. Instead you took a politicians word for it? Oh yeah, that’s a famously trustworthy source of information. You sat there and told me that Saddam Hussein was the biggest threat to the United States. You also told me that we should blindly support the president in times of war. Isn’t that how the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” happened?
The second one is that 66 percent of Americans in 2002 believed that Saddam had some involved with September 11th. On December 9, 2001 Vice President Cheney declared that an al-Qaeda operative and a member of the Iraqi intelligence in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Now, let us ignore the fact that Czechoslovakia had not existed for almost 9 years. I want to know if you even attempted to think for yourself here.
There are two reasons I would refute this idea. First, Al-Qaeda is an Islamist terrorist organization seeking to bring back the Caliph; Iraq is a secular Arab socialist country that does not want to be controlled by the religious right of Islam. If you think about it for one second: IT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE THAT THEY WOULD WORK TOGETHER.
So, that may be just the political savvy in me that makes that leap. But the second reason is more obvious. How many times have you taken one meeting with somebody and realized it wouldn’t work. Have you have had a job interview and then said “Well, that’s just not enough money?” Or, have you met up for coffee for a first date and then said to your friends, “He/she is fucking crazy?” One occurrence of a meeting does more to prove no connection – because they decided not to have a second!
The third piece of information: George Bush and Dick Cheney are oilmen. And, what they wanted to do was invade an oil rich country. That, in and of itself, should have set off alarm bells! I mean, do you trust the crack-dealer who wants to give you a free vacation to Colombia?
Lastly is Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s speech before the UN. Within two days it was shown that a lot of the “facts” in it were based upon plagiarized information from a six-year-old grad school paper. So a major piece of intelligence to sell you on the war is from six years ago and available to any Tom Dick or Harry getting his Master’s in Political Science? But, no, that seemed quite logical to you (and the press and administration had been hiding it all this time?)
George Bush may be a warmonger. The media and Senators may not have done their job in questioning the intelligence leading up to the war. But, in the court of public opinion, 62% of Americans refused to do their duty to make sure that politicians weren’t lying to them. Instead of finding irrefutable evidence of guilt, you ignored your duty as a citizen in a democracy. Would you have convicted your son or daughter on such evidence? Because, you not only convicted but you sentenced 3628 American sons and daughters and 73,611 Iraqi sons and daughters to death! THEIR BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS!