Events of the past few weeks have made it abundantly clear that the BushCheney administration has absolutely no intention - under any circumstances, no matter who is doing the talking or what reason is behind the argument - of listening to Congress, or military experts, or the American people when it comes to the occupation of Iraq.
This administration will carry out its harebrained and deadly delusional plans for the Middle East
No.
Matter.
What.
No matter what.
Let that sink in for a moment: No matter what.
(Also available at My Left Wing)
No matter that more American troops will get killed, for no effect. No matter that the vast majority of Iraqis - not the "dead-enders," not the "foreign Al Qaeda fighters," not the "people who hate freedom," but the vast majority of everyday Iraqis, the people whose freedom BushCheney like to tell us we are over there to defend - WANT US GONE. No matter that our idiotic invasion unleashed a sectarian civil war whose everyday carnage exceeds that of the wildest dreams of Saddam Hussein. No matter that the vast majority of Americans do not support an increase in our troop presence in Iraq. No matter that the invasion and occupation has created a breeding ground for terrorists that did not exist previously. No matter that the war has already cost $500 billion, and that its cumulative costs over time will exceed $2 trillion.
No.
Matter.
What.
This administration is going to pursue its insane delusions of Mideast hegemony and vast oil profits regardless of anything.
And people will die - are dying - as a result.
If we care about our troops, if we truly support our troops, we will not squander them any longer in this insane pursuit.
But to the BushCheney administration, all of this means nothing. Reality does not enter into their calculations. Blood and treasure – as long as it is not theirs – is not a consideration for them. They have no intention of bringing the troops home, because they could not possibly care less about the troops, except as tools to achieve their dubious ends.
These people have never "supported the troops." When you truly support the troops, you don't say dismissive, demeaning things like, "Oh, come on - people are fungible," or, "You go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have". When you truly support the troops, you don't work hard to cut veterans' benefits. When you truly support the troops, you don't make sure your big campaign contributors get exclusive contracts to supply inferior body armor, when much better is available. When you truly support the troops, you don't put Big Business political cronies in charge of Veterans' Affairs, so that they can line their deep, filthy pockets at the expense of those troops.
In order for BushCo to really support the troops, they'd have to understand their situation. They'd have to be capable of empathy. They'd have to understand what it must be like to walk down a street in Nassiriyah, not knowing whether there was a sniper drawing a bead on you at that very moment, that whatever thought was in your head at that very moment might be the last one you ever have.
They'd have to understand what it must be like to gather the body parts of a buddy, scattered across a street in Samarra after being hit by an IED or a mortar round.
They'd have to understand what it must be like to breathe Depleted Uranium dust day after day after day, not knowing whether you'll develop cancer from it, and whether the government that sent you there to breathe the DU dust in pursuit of securing oil contracts for big political contributors, will deign to pay for your medical care for the rest of your impaired life.
They'd have to understand what it must be like to drive an unarmored tanker truck in a convoy from Basra to Baghdad, wondering whether the pickup truck coming the opposite direction on the highway is just carrying a family, or 500 kilos of explosives.
They'd have to understand what it must be like to empty the ammo box of a .50-caliber machine gun into the passenger compartment of an ancient Nissan sedan as it speeds without slowing toward a checkpoint in Tikrit, and then to pull out what's left of a father and mother from the front seat and have to console the screaming 5-year-old in the back seat who's covered with the bloody scraps of what used to be her father's brain – the brains of a father who will never again hold her in his arms, or dance with her at her wedding.
And they'd have to understand what it must be like to hear, see, smell, feel and taste these things when you wake with a start at 3:00 a.m. every night after you finally rotate back home to suburban Richmond, or Springfield or Riverside.
And there is no possibility of them understanding that, ever.
What has been asked of our troops has no modern equivalent. Not since World War II have our soldiers faced such lengthy, effectively indeterminate deployments - and even then, a draft was in place to at least theoretically ensure the contribution of every able-bodied American male. And yet this administration has the audacity, the absolutely breathtaking chutzpah, to use the fact that the members of our current military volunteered, to justify with the dismissive wave of a blood-soaked hand the continued bloodletting by these troops: Well, they volunteered, didn't they?
Cheney and Bush have not the first clue about how to run this occupation (giving them, for the moment, the benefit of the doubt that they did NOT intend for things to turn out as they have). They refused to listen to people who knew about such things; they raced pell-mell into a conflict they had been looking for an excuse to start since 1997. Had they been willing to listen, to pay attention to history and to others who had been down that tortuous dead-end path before them, they might have made choices more wise. But they chose to ignore history, and the advice of others.
It's as if these guys had never heard of Vietnam. Oh, we know they have heard of it - most of them did everything they and their daddies could do to keep them away from that horrible nightmare on the other side of the world, that steaming, primeval jungleland of their fever dreams: populated by yellow-skinned, slanty-eyed people who all look alike and who all wanted to slit their fat, pasty-white bellies and dine on their entrails!!! It's a war they never want to be reminded of, a word they never want to hear again: Vietnam! Vietnam! Vietnam! VIETNAM! VIETNAM!
VIETNAM.
And they certainly never wanted to hear the counsel of those men who had actually gone over there and served their country, who had seen the death and insanity up close, who had had a hand in the near-murder of an ancient civilization and the sullying of a much younger one. They spurned the advice of those who knew that what these neocon chickenhawks wanted to pursue in the oilfields of the Middle East was a fool's errand - at least as long as it was packaged in the tattered rags of a "war on terror," because these men, these war-weary warriors, knew that the real terror was the one that would be unleashed by such a foolish endeavor.
The old warriors knew that in such a war, mothers and children would become less than the sum of their parts, as those parts would be scattered all over the streets and desert villages of ancient Mesopotamia, cradle of civilization. They knew that American soldiers, too, would become less than the sum of their parts, even if they were lucky enough to return to these shores with all of those parts still attached. They knew that often the walking bodies of those returning to these shores would be mere shells, half-empty repositories where full, vibrant young men and women once had lived and thrived, but no more.
They knew that the price exacted by war, especially - not exclusively, but especially - a war where our soldiers and their countrymen have been told that the people who are trying to kill them are the ones they were sent to liberate, because they had fought in just such a war themselves - cannot be calculated in mere dollars spent on bombs and bullets, and not even in the fiscal year or two after the shooting stops, if it ever can be calculated. No, the price of war is amortized in the toll it takes on those walking wounded, those shattered half-full vessels that once were boys and girls, and on their families and on those around them, and on the society within which they must painfully try to fit, in spite of all they know and all they have seen, pretending not to still know and not to still see all that they will forever know and all that they will forever see.
Through their utterly cavalier and insensitive squandering of people and materiel, the BushCheney administration has seriously degraded our military, and as a result, its ability to deal with REAL threats from REAL terrorists - and that, in this day and age, is absolutely unforgivable. Cindy Sheehan asked the question, "For what noble cause did my son die?" Now that we know the truth, no one who is honest can say that he died to protect the United States of America - the United States of America did not face a threat from Saddam Hussein that was not already well contained and virtually toothless, yet the BushCheney neocon-led cabal lied about and corrupted the good work of dedicated intelligence agents of this country - including revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative and her entire "brass-plate" cover operation, thus endangering - and perhaps even costing - the lives of many brave men and women in foreign countries who had been working on behalf of the United States, to keep it safe from real threats by weapons of mass destruction. Such callous contempt for human life - particularly the lives of those who are willing to risk their lives to protect this country and its people - is unforgivable, and all too typical of so many in this administration.
And yet - in his bloated, self-centered, delusional, megalomaniacal waking fever dream, Dick Cheney - he of the five deferments - can still say of this Iraq debacle that he cheer-led for, "the world is better off for it." Ass. Maybe your world - the world that could not possibly ever in a million years care less about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and thousands of American soldiers. How could anyone who was awake during the past five years possibly say something like the following in response to the inarguable statement of fact that there is a terrible situation in Iraq:
No, there is not. There is not. There's problems, ongoing problems, but we have, in fact, accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime, and there is a new regime in place that's been there for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off. They have got a democratically written constitution, first ever in that part of the world. They've had three national elections. . .
Elections? Please. The South Vietnamese held elections in 1967, elections with a higher turnout than those in Iraq. Eight years later, overloaded helicopters were frantically taking off from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.
So there's been a lot of success. . .
We still have more work to do to get a handle on the security situation, but the President has put a plan in place to do that.
Such delusion and lies, I grow weary. "Get a handle on the security situation." He actually said that. If anyone needs to get a handle on anything, it’s BushCheney and the neocon lunatics who need to get a grip on reality.
Please do not insult, by your blathering, the memories of those who have died in Iraq, you venomous, cowardly serpent.
The man has no conscience, no moral compass. The lies and delusions issue forth from his mouth like the maggoty offspring of the noisome blowfly that he is:
And we've been very successful with going after al Qaeda.
Saddam Hussein would still be in power. He would, at this point, be engaged in a nuclear arms race with Ahmadinejad . . . He was not being contained. He was not being contained
what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do; the world is much safer today because of it.
he kicked out all the inspectors. . . He was a safe haven for terror
we have, in fact, accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime
We'll continue to consult with the Congress.
Oh, I think in terms of mistakes, I think we underestimated the extent to which 30 years of Saddam's rule had really hammered the population, especially the Shia population, into submissiveness
Wolf, you've got to let Nouri al Maliki deal with the situation as he sees fit.
Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.
Dick Cheney, our vice president, is either lying, or utterly disconnected from reality, or both. There is no other explanation for the yawning gap between his words and the truth on the ground in Iraq.
I’m guessing that, most of the time, he's just lying.
But it's not even malicious lying anymore. It's pathetic. This administration's attempts to sell chicken shit as chicken salad are so utterly threadbare now as to be almost laughable, if there weren't so many people dying and so much money being spent, and so much being made. What we're seeing as we watch Cheney desperately attempt to make Wolf Blitzer look like the ridiculous, pathetic one in the room, as Cheney's world goes swirling down the toilet with the testimony of Catherine Martin at the Scooter Libby trial, as the truth comes out about Cheney’s gag order to the Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee stifling release of its findings about prewar intelligence on Iraq - what we're seeing is a demonstration of just what an amoral 66-year-old meatsack looks like as it comes apart at the seams.
The "necessity" for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was sold by the BushCheney cabal under false pretenses, and authorized therefore by Congress with erroneous assumptions.
Here's what Congress authorized on October 16, 2002 (PDF file):
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to—
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
- and here is the meat of U.N. Resolution 1441, the pertinent resolution vis-à-vis the aforementioned Iraq AUMF passed by Congress:
5. Decides that Iraq shall provide UNMOVIC and the IAEA immediate, unimpeded, unconditional, and unrestricted access to any and all, including underground, areas, facilities, buildings, equipment, records, and means of transport which they wish to inspect, as well as immediate, unimpeded, unrestricted, and private access to all officials and other persons whom UNMOVIC or the IAEA wish to interview
So - given that Congress authorized the use of force in Iraq for only two reasons – first, to defend the national security of the United States against a perceived threat from Iraq, and second, to enforce U.N. resolutions (primarily 1441) – and neither of those reasons carries weight any longer, there no longer exists a justification from Congress for the administration to maintain U.S. forces in Iraq.
But the President of the United States doesn’t acknowledge that. In his State of the Union message the other day, he said this about current state of the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we're in.
Meaning – I don’t care what the reasons were that Congress gave in order to authorize military action in Iraq.
Yet it would not be like us to leave our promises unkept . . .
What promises? To whom? I don’t see any promises in the AUMF.
and our own security at risk.
Does anyone seriously believe that our national security will be jeopardized by us leaving Iraq? Anyone besides Kool-Aid-drinking neocons, that is? Please.
Ladies and gentlemen: On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.
Hear that? All that is missing is resolve – oh, and a new strategy. And guess what? Wait for it -
We're carrying out a new strategy in Iraq -- a plan that demands more from Iraq's elected government, and gives our forces in Iraq the reinforcements they need to complete their mission.
You’re lying, Mr. President: you don’t have a new strategy - you have the Same Old One, only more so. And you’re wrong, Mr. President: our mission was spelled out in the AUMF – and that mission was completed long ago.
Our goal is a democratic Iraq that upholds the rule of law, respects the rights of its people, provides them security, and is an ally in the war on terror.
You’re dead wrong, Mr. President - our goal was spelled out in the AUMF. You do not have the authority to change that.
It is clear from the unabated bellicose rhetoric coming from this administration that there is no intention to abide by the Constitutional provisions manifest in the AUMF; i.e., Congress’s sole authority to declare war.
Just because the president says we are at war, does not make it so.
Only Congress has the authority to do that.
This administration has chosen to ignore that truth. And it has cost our country dearly.
Does anyone really have any doubt anymore that this administration has no intention of heeding any advice or mandate or public opinion or military opinion or any opinion other than their own? That nothing short of impeachment and removal from office will stop them from careening down the highway to hell in the delusional pursuit of their insane worldview?
They. Are. Not. Going. To. Stop.
It is high time to put a stop to this madness. Clearly, this administration has absolutely no intention to stop its warmaking regardless of the wishes of Congress, or of the people of this country.
There is only one way remaining to put a halt to the needless, illegal sacrifice of our combat troops, our national wealth, and the lives and resources of the Iraqi people:
The president and vice president must be impeached. Nothing less will stop them.
Saturday, there will be rallies. If you can, please join one. I suffer under no misapprehension that anyone in this administration will heed the voices, no matter how numerous, no matter how thoughtful, no matter how passionate, no matter how prominent. But the administration is not the intended audience for these rallies.
These rallies will show the American people and their elected representatives the determination and the strength of those who recognize the need for this country to put an end to this national shame.
And that will make a difference. Believe it.