Iraq: It Still Matters Why We Went In

Brady Bonk has a great blog post on why the most important topic for Congressional oversight -- why we invaded Iraq -- is being overlooked.  Besides our democracy's urgent need for accountability over warmaking, Brady sees electoral blood in the water:

[Iraq War oversight] should have been this Congress’ focus, not legislation. Get these assholes in front of committees and cameras. Inquire. Subpoeana. Make them say "I don’t remember" a thousand times. Force them to consider risking contempt. Show the American public, day after day after day, what a bunch of lying, thieving, incompetent, stupid bastards led us into this ridiculous, far too costly occupation of Iraq. Grab headlines. Uncover every dirty little nasty truth about Iraq that you can, and then run on it in 2008 and beyond, use it to cement a truly veto-proof majority. THEN’s when you get to vote to end it.

But I think Brady still misses the most important reason why Congress needs to clarify for the American people the reason we got into Iraq.  That reason is that nothing — not even oil, spreading "democracy," toppling Saddam, fighting Islamofascism, or enriching Halliburton — matters more to this White House than avoiding the admission of error.

If error can never be admitted, it logically follows that Bush will not withdraw from Iraq under any circumstance in which he cannot plausibly claim that his objectives in going into Iraq were not successfully met.

Until the White House is forced to state definitively what those objectives were, and to admit that those objectives, being grounded in false premises, can never be satisfied, this war will continue, and worse, will continue to be directed solely by the impossible mission of achieving retroactive vindication for the Bush administration.  America will continue to hold its shares of Enron, because they might still pay off, as long as we don't sell.

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  by lawprofessor on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 02:53:21 AM PDT

  •  This is exactly why I find it so bizarre

    that anyone still talks about the occupation of Iraq in terms of "winning" and "losing." It's like, imagine you're playing a board game and you have no idea what the objective is. You're just going to keep rolling the dice and getting nowhere. You can never "win" if "winning" has never been defined. We can't "win" in Iraq if we've never determined what our goals are. It's so fucking absurd. Congresspeople are always saying something like, "The Democrats want to accept defeat," or, "The war is already lost," or, "Victory is still possible in Iraq," but the much more basic question is, "What the hell are we trying to do?"

    It's crazy.

    by JeremyA on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 09:11:44 AM PDT

•  Oh there is a worse problem.

  Anything in the past is now beyond judgement, beyond analysis, beyond criticism.

  As in "well regardless of how we got to this point, what matters now is . . . ." This line is very successfully peddled every day. It is allowed to stop further analysis. The "emergency" created by the Bush administration takes precedence over any discussion of the wisdom of the imbecility that got us here.

  by melvin on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 02:58:07 AM PDT

  •  That's just the conventional wisdom

    Brady addresses this in his post.

    by lawprofessor on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 04:14:20 AM PDT

  •  History is less and less relevant to anything

    Melvin makes a good point that what is past is soon forgotten.  May I offer a hypothesis to explain this?  Knowledge (information, data) is turning over so fast because of technology that what happened last week is old news and, in some cases, what happened an hour ago is obsolete.  The old saying "History repeats itself" just doesn't work as a tool for evaluating this new world that has no history. I've been playing with this idea for a while now and I'm pretty sure it props up a lot of what Rovian politics and msm rely on: Truth is what's in our face at any given moment and soon forgotten.

    by cas2 on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 06:52:17 AM PDT

•  Here is how this plays out.

  bush says, "we went into Iraq for Oil because if we didn't get it, someone else would and they would ransom that oil to us. Lack of oil would bring this Country to its knees." And that is all he would have to say to bring his base back on board. Remember these are the wealthy selfish people who think only of themselves. Better that we spend the time appealing to the real people here who still have their souls.

  by Owllwoman on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 03:04:52 AM PDT

•  Helen Thomas keeps on bringing it up.

  And they keep dismissing her with that patronizing smirk that says "crazy old bat."

  by melvin on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 03:07:43 AM PDT

•  though, this could have another effect...

  Get the Bushies talking about why they did Iraq.  

  This in turn will dredge up a whole lotta' lies and obfuscations and hang them out on the washline for all the public to see.  

  It will probably dredge up some overt crimes, including possibly some new ones we haven't heard of before.  

  And thus it will become excellent fertilizer for growing 'peaches.

  Remember, the first 'peach is for Five-Deferment Dick.  

  by G2geek on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 03:18:53 AM PDT

•  I have a neat summary...

  ...of the Bush dictatorship years: The Heartless allied with the Mindless in order to crush the Spineless.  Unfortunately, the spineless are what we have to work with now, and they prefer the taste of shit over peaches.  Their philosophy is, if you don't believe you can get a conviction before even having an investigation, there's no point to even trying, so they've developed an entire rationale around collaboration and appeasement.  

  They will not be convinced to do their duty.  Most Democrats in federal office today got there by avoiding anything resembling controversy at all costs, which is the only way anyone with some level of values is currently able to avoid being targeted by the power elite.  If they so much as make a stern comment, the GOP propaganda machine will flood their offices with fake outrage from nonexistent people, and most of them will immediately backpedal.

  This is the situation as we've allowed it to become.  Republicans are mindless animals, and we can hardly blame them for being what they are.  Rather, we must accept responsibility for having let things go this far, and begin rolling back the damage in the government and within the Party.  Darwinian attrition at the ballot box created these gelatinous blobs we call leaders, and only subsequent rounds of it in primaries will return leaders whose hearts pump blood.

  by Troubadour on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 04:17:05 AM PDT

•  You're right

  and I'm dismayed by the lack of leadership by the Dems on this. They want to put on their happy faces and tell voters, "Elect me, and I'll make the boo boo ALL better!"  

  Right, give me Advil and kiss my forehead to make my head stop hurting when there's a big nasty cancerous tumor growing inside.

  WTF is wrong with the American people? They want an EASY button for everything.

  If we don't get to the filthy bottom of why we invaded Iraq, these criminals will resurface again in the future, even if we manage to turn them out electorally in 2008--and that's no sure thing, for several reasons.

  Let's stop looking for magic bullets and drag the beast out in the open and deal with it, once and for all. No guts, no glory.  

  by jasmint53 on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 04:55:18 AM PDT

•  Yes -- we need a Root Cause Analysis.

  Determining how we got here is essential if even the semblance of democracy is to be saved in these Untied States. Congress must determine why and how Congress allowed itself to be led around by the nose ring by a rogue White House. It must act now to reassert its power for the next time we get a cowboy executive. We need a War Powers Act 2007, and it needs to have not just teeth, but fangs. This can only come about by blasting sunshine on this Dirty Big War, and by coming to a more honest conventional wisdom, that what’s wrong with Iraq wasn’t the mission’s execution, but that we even undertook it in the first place.

  This is exactly right.  In IT at the company where I work, every "incident" -- our term for a disastrous fuckup that caused production downtime -- is followed by a Root Cause Analysis.  Everyone involved gets together in a room and gets to the bottom of what happened, because this is the only way to insure that it doesn't happen again.  That is precisely what we need on bu$hco's disastrous fuckup, the Iraq war.

  by snazzzybird on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 05:45:40 AM PDT

  •  That's the way business does it, but

    that isn't good enough for our CEO Pres... uh ... our CEO ... um ... never mind.

    Rec'd for "Root Cause Analysis".

    by dconrad on Mon Jul 16, 2007 at 05:23:39 AM PDT

•  The "why" is of paramount importance

  Actions have consequences.  The Brits have informed the public of what I envisioned all along: our ill-advised and heavy-handed invasion has seriously imperiled the Musharraf regime.  And if you don't understand what that would mean, think of Osama having nukes and the ability to throw them at the Strait of Hormuz.

  by Intrepid Republican on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 05:55:32 AM PDT

•  Even Jesus said the Foundation Mattered

  Luke 6:46-49  "Why do you call Me, `Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say? "Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them, I will show you whom he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built. "But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly, is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great."

  Luke 14:28-31 "For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? "Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying,  'This man began to build and was not able to finish.' "Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand {men} to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand?

  It is inconceivable that anyone, especially Christians can support the War (in Iraq/on terror/against Al Quada/or whatever it is called today).  At the very beginning the foundation was faulty.  Based on the shifting sands of changing rationales, it is universally agreed that the excuse for this war was based on "false and misleading information.  But now that we have been engaged for these many years we see that that no one "counted the cost" or even had a plan for victory.  

  As we face the beginning of the end we must at the very least recognize that the foundation was faulty, we still can’t identify the enemy and we still can’t describe what victory looks like.  

  by motormouth on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 07:12:46 AM PDT

•  I just cannot see the possibility of "error"....

  because it implies a mistake was made.  The path to Iraq was a textbook case in why you don't draw your curve before you plot your data points.  

  The question you ask is also the question that could land Bush and company in the Hague. This is also a very good example of why preemptive war is wrong.  The burn bags and shredders will be working overtime just prior to these asshats leaving office.  

  by Habanero on Sun Jul 15, 2007 at 07:22:31 AM PDT

•  Thursday

  Kimberly Kagan: al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is actually the central front in the war on terror according to the global al Qaeda second in charge Zawahiri who issued a statement just a couple of weeks ago encouraging jihadists to fight the United States in Iraq. And I think that before we decide that al Qaeda is elsewhere and must be fought elsewhere, we must realize that whatever the situation was in Iraq in 2003, right now al Qaeda is in Iraq, it is fighting and killing US soldiers, Iraqi civilians and it is in fact funneling regional assets into Iraq rather than elsewhere around the globe.

  Diane Rehm: General Clark.

  GENERAL WESLEY CLARK Well I certainly wouldn't take my enemy's definition of what the central front on war should be. In World War II, we didn't listen to the Nazi high command tell us where they wanted us to invade, we didn't listen to the Japanese tell us where they wanted us to invade and we shouldn't listen to Zawahiri when he says Iraq is the central front. It's a good front for Zawahiri because he's got access to a lot of American soldiers to attack and train against and build al Qaeda. It's been a diversion and a distraction for the United States to have engaged in the war in Iraq. It was a strategic failure.

  by pollwatch on Mon Jul 16, 2007 at 03:38:05 AM PDT