It has been more than five years since LondonYank last posted a diary on DailyKos. I thought I would write one now as a retrospective on why I used to blog almost daily here. I believed then that it might matter. It didn't.
In 2004 I blogged almost daily about the fraudulent attempts of the Bush administration to fabricate justifications for the Iraq War. It was transparent to me then that Judith Miller of the New York Times was a shill, hanging with the Bushistas at the Aspen Institute, holidaying at Cheney's ranch, and writing to order about anthrax and chemical weapons. It was transparent to me that Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress was a CIA tool, convicted embezzler, fraudster and counterfeiter who had produced documents and witnesses to Saddam's tyranny for his paymasters in the Bush administration. It was transparent to me that the Niger uranium forgeries came from the same SISMI-Michael Ledeen intelligence channel that had been used to fabricate terrorism to order in Europe and the Middle East for more than three decades.
In the "you're either with us or with the terrorists" days following 9/11 it didn't matter that I was right. I was a conspiracy theorist. Our government wouldn't lie to us about something as important as war. DailyKos gave me a place to write the truth, where people who read it could consider it, and we could discuss it together. That was terribly important to me then, and I am grateful.
But almost exactly the same patterns of faked evidence and fraudulent blame are obvious over the past five Obama years in US war-mongering for Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Iran. And I shrug. I don't bother writing. I don't bother documenting the frauds. It won't matter any more now than it did under Bush.
When American presidents want a war, they get a war. The American people define themselves by having enemies. They need them. They will always create them to order as needed.
I was invited to speak on a panel at an IT event last month about blogging because I once had a big following. Some of my diaries on DailyKos had more than 500,000 hits - more than the circulation of the New York Times. It made me think about why I had written so much, and why I had stopped. I looked back on the diaries I had written here, and I was proud of the quality and the style for the most part, but it didn't evoke any desire to write again.
During the panel discussion I was asked why I would write about war given it had no connection to my own life. I said that it bothered me that there were only 30,000 proveable Iraqi deaths attributed to Saddam Hussein before 2003, whereas there were more than 1 million proveable Iraqi deaths attributed to the Iraq War and more than 5 million refugees forced to flee the war in Iraq. I said I was proud of having documented CIA rendition flights when the US media was still refusing to cover the story. Someone in the audience squeaked, "Can we not discuss politics? Can we please move on?" I smiled and said, "Sure." We moved on. She proved my point.
My being right is now irrelevant and was irrelevant when I was writing as LondonYank. My knowing more than my audience only made them uncomfortable. They didn't want the truth in 2003. They don't want the truth now.
I am still writing about war, but the wars I am writing about now happened in 1066 AD and in 55 BC. I am happier writing about William the Conqueror and Julius Caesar. It doesn't matter any more than writing about current events. It doesn't matter less either.
SOME FAVOURITES
BLOGSWARM: Nixon Era Hank Paulson
Bandar Bush the Black Ops Bagman
Informants and Instigators
BBC News: 3 CIA Black Ops Assassins at RFK Assassination
Robert Gates Promoted and Financed Osama Bin Laden
Prince of Darkness: Iraq Canvas "Simply Too Small"
Bush/Blair Agreed Lebanon War BEFORE Kidnaps?
Aspens Hobbling the UN with Oil-For-Food Forgeries
Ahmad Chalabi Wins the Iraq War! Iraqis Lose.
The Pentagon in One Pocket, the CIA in Another
Vegetarians Attack Sears Tower
Bush's Felon Job Placement Program
Guantanamo Baywatch - Satire On The Bush Blair Axis
I do want to acknowledge that I had Kossacks as friends I valued.
Soonergrunt: "My watch shot off my wrist"