It's been a lovely campaign - the White House's publicity war swallowed hook line and sinker by a fear-numbed American public willingly convinced that invading Iraq urgently served their safety. So anxious were Americans to get the pre-emptive war for democracy's defense started, regardless of contravening facts, that it was irrelevant for us to know that US Special Forces arrived in Iraq before the war, investigated suspected weapons of mass destruction sites, and came up with nothing, not one dusty Scud. All USSF could do was confirm what US and British intelligence services had reported for months. But finding NO-WMD's would delay the start of Operation Who's Your Daddy and the President's imminent warriordom.
Just in case, I suspect Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Plan B had the President announcing that the ever crafty Saddam Hussein had miniaturized his massive stockpiles of WMD with his secret new French made Shrinker-Ray and Energized them to Syria, from where they'd be released on Hollywood, California. Colin Powell would present with feeling before the UN.
And like Secretary Powell's real UN Power Point that now looks as historically accurate as an Oliver Stone movie, the truth behind the White House's motives for the attack on Iraq would be of little interest to the American public - winning, washing away all treachery.
Not that it should be up to average Americans to investigate the Executive. That's a task for their Congress. Yet, the U.S. Congress's disinterest in the deceit that led to the US invasion of Iraq remains beneath contempt. They kept their heads in the sand when surrendering their Constitutional duty, abrogating their war making powers to the Chief Executive, and they keep their heads between their knees still. At least on the President's behalf one must say he had the courage of his convictions, played the mother of all Texas stud poker selling the world a pig in a poke and betting his presidency on its squeal. His guts are as admirable as the Congress's are douched.
What's clear is that after throwing everything at the gullibility wall and seeing what stuck, the bull throwing architects of the war settled on weapons of mass destruction as justification for invasion and called it Iraqi Freedom for good sell. The propaganda war having been won in the US (although lost in the remainder of the civilized world), WMD was as good a pretext as any. The hucksters' unscrupulous souls must have warmed as the battle date gained and their pollsters reported that their designated war motive was defended by an overwhelming number of the nuclear-night fearing public. One week into the war, Americans were by then so roused by the White House's patriot platform that 69% polled claimed that even if no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons were found in Iraq it was right to launch the operation. Talk about collateral dividends.
The American public had been turned so pathetically craven with fear of terror on their soil that true justification for war was only something anti-American extremists could possibly demand. By the time Good President Bush was finished with us, only Saddam-siding baby murdering freedom haters could possibly oppose ridding the world of the alleged Iraqi WMD machine, while happening to free the serfs.
Talk TV and radio reminded us that only suspect individuals could stand making something of the minor facts that the Chief Executive after virtually no debate in the Congress used his nation's military might to invade a sovereign country, unprovoked, unthreatened, unconstitutionally, based on dreamed-up evidence in order to satisfy the expansion of unidentified strategic interests. Only a Nazi could claim that liberating the long-suffering Iraqi people had nothing to do with the war's ultimate rational. Only a disloyal American would say that George W. Bush wouldn't recognize a suffering Iraqi if he tripped over one shampooing the Oval rug.
But what's even patriotically lower is stating that the expediency for Operation Iraqi Freedom was unmotivated by the national security interest of the US (a contained Saddam posing not threat to us), but animated by a crusade to see our will be done in the region - US aggression now defined as sowing democracy anywhere we topple governments.
The packaging is a recognizable one of not so new imperialist wine in very old conquistador bottles; but old wine drinkers recognize it as the doctrine of power and control, and identify it as having nothing to do with conservatism, but compatible instead with the apparatus of mega-state polity necessary to ensure domination. Iraq was too fetchingly attractive and opportune a tactical pivot ripe for the plucking to ignore.
As for the American people's interest in the grand strategy imposed in their name, it shouldn't be too hard to keep our concerns irrelevant. Our almost completely childish acquiescence to the President's simple and incessant message of fear and freedom should be easy to maintain for some time by simply pushing either or both buttons and exploiting our stoked fears. So mesmerized are we with our warrior president, that if after he landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln he claimed to have been briefly abducted in flight by aliens and seen Elvis, 78% of American's polled would have probably wondered what color jumpsuit The King wore.
For now, as US weapons inspectors continue in vain taking apart an Iraqi mobile home in the middle of our temporal 51st state, it appears that my previously stated volition to eat every ounce of active weaponised grade anthrax discovered in Iraq is still unlikely to bring me indigestion. For the sake of the faith and trust, our country places in our highest elected leaders I almost hope our inspectors find something for me to consider.
The foundational rational for invading Iraq was to disarm Saddam Hussein of outlawed weapons he was allegedly planning to use against us and our allies, and to destroy thousands of tons of illegal weapons materials the White House claimed his regime possessed. To date with not a single illegal weapon identified or gram of lethal chemicals discovered, President Bush's justification to the world for taking over Iraq is proving to have been a fraudulent expedience.
If nothing in the way of weapons of mass destruction or their active manufacture which the Administration claimed they knew existed in Iraq turn up, and they then walk away unchallenged from their unbridled deception, then corruption trumps truth and the sublime allure of its convenience corrupts absolutely everything thought or discussed and absolves everyone engaged in the machinery of giving and carrying out orders in the name of the American people. This can't be for what United States Marines fought, died, and won a war.
May 16, 2003