Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Re: Shooting fish in a barrel

Re: Shooting fish in a barrel
Robert — (archived)

Tom, your parting shot:

Of course, to a megalomaniac, the nation comes a distant second to himself, so I suppose that was futile to start with.

illustrates why it's perfectly clear (to anyone not befuddled by partisan loyalty) that Bush was hell-bent to have his war. Every time he or a lieutenant made a "reasonable demand", it ended with "but of course they'll lie and cheat, so it doesn't actually matter how they respond"...almost like the phrase had replaced the period as the punctuation ending each sentence. C'mon, nobody was fooled for a minute.

The history of this is not so old yet that I don't remember...

Remember "He trod ta kill mah Daddy!"? How about the time, over a year ago, he burst into Connie Rice's office, with a third party witness present, yelling "We're gonna kill that [some expletive deleted in the original, darn it] Saddam!"? Remember the Bush Regime being reluctantly dragged to the UN? Remember shortly after the inspections started the declarations that they wouldn't matter because the Iraqis would lie and conceal? Remember how, every time the inspectors came up empty handed, the Bushies explained that it didn't matter because the Iraqis were simply hiding the stuff.

There was no way to meet Bush's "reasonable demands", because they were a fiction. Bush was never serious about offering Saddam any options, that was all cynical window-dressing. The decision to go to war was a done deal a year ago.

Which is why the question "OK, smartasses, where are those WMDs, anyway, huh?" is such a hot topic. Finding them is the only rebuttal to the charge that the whole thing was based on a fabricated premise.

Why am I still beating this horse after we won the war? I want to challenge the Right's circular assertion that because we won, we were right to go to war in the first place. Success doesn't vindicate a belligerent policy, nor does it paper over the gaping holes in the rationalizations for war. Arguing that victory retroactively supplies the moral justification for war is nothing more than a verbose way of saying "might makes right". I don't want that bully's logic to become the policy of my United States. "The first taste is free", says the heroin dealer...the use of military power to solve every perceived problem is dangerously seductive, never more so than after one spectacular success.

--Robert

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (78 posts)