What is it, then
When our government attempted to sell us the war in Iraq, with dire pronoucements of impending attack from armed drones and suitcase bombs, and the urgent need to remove a tyrant from the Middle East, they did so by using a few “bullet items” such as:
Saddam is a brutal dictator who gassed his own citizens with chemical weapons.
Saddam and his sons ran horrible prisons where enemies of the state were subjected to torture, murder and rape.
I’m not going to provide links to this stuff- it’s all readily available, in spades.
Of course, none of the threatened attacks happened, information has come to light that Saddam perhaps didn’t gas the Kurds (Iran did), leaving the US to weakly offer its latest rationale, namely that installing a democratic government in the region will lead to an outbreak of freedom in the area. While the jury is out on that, we can report certain developments in Iraq.
The US troops used chemical weapons in the attack on Fallujah last year, burning people alive with a version of napalm called white phosphorus that literally melts flesh from bone. Italian TV station RAI will be running a documentary that shows evidence of this.
Next, the White House has again won an extension of the case brought by the ACLU ordering it to show further images from Abu Ghraib prison. Images that are reported to show US troops overseeing the rape of children by Iraqi prisoners.
So it is simple to see that the only difference between our government and that of Iraqs (or Iran, or Syria, et al) is a matter of scale. They used WMD’s, we use WMDs (DU bombs). They used chemical weapons, we use chemical weapons. They ran a prison with “rape rooms”- we run THE SAME F’N PRISON with rape rooms. Where is our moral superority? Can we claim the high ground because we’re “not as bad as Saddam”? I don’t think so.
To read and watch the apologists for our current regime (called the GOP) stall any investigation into the lies and illegal acts of our government seems to be so much whistling past the graveyard. Arguing that the Plame investigation was a failure because no one was able to prove she was covert- morons, the investigation was started by the CIA- you’d think they would have final say over the status of their agents, right? To watch our fearless leader lie that we don’t engage in torture is in itself a form of torture- watching that sad excuse of a man lie in my name, while I’m largely powerless to stop it, is emotionally crushing. If, as the good little brownshirts in the blogs and media would have you believe, we’re actually fighting to maintain our way of life, well then, let it fall.
And fall it will. Not today, or maybe even this year, but soon. The only question is, will it be soon enough? Will some measure of sanity be restored to our nation before we’re attacked again. Before our treasury is looted, infrastructure gutted, and our military and security systems run into the ground? Before Bush Katrinas the world?
Time will tell.
