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Apologies
Now Being Accepted
August
22, 2003
By Mike McArdle
Well, it looks like the wimpy, irrelevant UN Security Council
was right, the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French were
right, the British people (as opposed to their government)
were right, and those hate-America peacenik anti-war demonstrators
were right.
The Iraq war has degenerated into a complete disaster, an
utterly unwinnable quagmire that threatens to become a treasury-emptying
ten year guerilla war that will kill thousands, and - as an
added bonus - become a enormously successful recruiting device
for the Islamic fundamentalists who want to drive both America
and Israel from the Middle East. So take a bow, Susan Sarandon
and Janeane Garofalo - you called it. You were right on the
money but unfortunately the powers that be didn't listen to
you.
But don't expect any apologies from the Bill O'Reillys and
the Sean Hannitys and the Rush Limbaughs (the ones who, of
course, had it totally wrong). Being a right-wing jerk means
never having to say you're sorry, and the aforementioned crowd
will now scream that the war just needs more time and that
eventually Iraq will become a model pro-American Middle Eastern
nation with a freely elected pro-American government. But
they probably know that that is just an absurd pipe-dream,
and that the end of this misguided adventure is likely to
be even uglier than it is at present. They'll never say so,
of course, because to admit that would be to admit that people
like Sheryl Crow were dead right. And that is something they
could never do.
As a truck bomb blew up a hotel that housed UN headquarters
in Baghdad on Tuesday the myth of "Mission Accomplished,"
already on the critical list, exploded at the same time. Frantically,
the little man who is supposed to be in charge of the situation
was dragged from the golf course to make an obligatory statement.
(It wouldn't have looked good for him to be lining up a putt
while the bodies were being pulled from the burning building.)
Rushed in front of a teleprompter he made a speech worthy
of William Westmoreland during the Tet offensive: "Every sign
of progress in Iraq adds to the desperation of the terrorists
and the remnants of Saddam's brutal regime." Yep, he's
still fighting Saddam, and now those blown apart bodies just
go to show he's got him right where he wants him. And he continues
to maintain the fiction that this is all about helping the
Iraqis - the bombers are "the enemies of every nation that
seeks to help the Iraqi people." But some people, like, for
example, Helen Thomas, knew from the start that bombing and
invading people was a strange way to go about helping them.
And people like Helen were loudly berated and abused for
their warnings, as was Representative Jim McDermott who visited
Baghdad last fall in an effort to mediate the situation and
maybe avert war. Conservatives reacted with horror and indignation
when he suggested that the administration would lie to create
a rationale for the war if they didn't have one. But that's
exactly what happened, isn't it ? There were the trumped up
stories of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to
be non-existent. There was the "yellowcake" from
Niger that they slipped into the State of the Union speech
knowing it was untrue, the drone aircraft that were going
to drop WMDs on the US even though they had a range of only
a couple hundred miles, the aluminum tubes that weren't really
for a nuclear program. All were deliberate attempts to deceive
the public into supporting the war – in other words they were
lies. But I have a feeling nobody has called Rep. McDermott
to say that they were wrong to call him a traitor.
And as calamitous as things are now they may indeed get
quite a bit worse since the neocon cabal that brought us the
war is in no mood to start admitting that it might have been
a bad idea. In the words of Robert Byrd, "it is becoming
all too clear that the smiling face of the U.S. as liberator
is quickly assuming the scowl of an occupier," and that
scowl gives the terrorists exactly the recruiting tool they
need to blow up more buildings and kill more US soldiers.
But Bush and the neocons will never acknowledge that Byrd
and Jimmy Carter and the others who opposed this travesty
were right. So more US soldiers will die and be wounded, as
well as more Iraqis and journalists and UN officials (if the
UN doesn't simply terminate its humanitarian mission after
Tuesday's bombing).
So an already disastrous policy will be continued just to
save face. The classic mistake of Vietnam will be repeated.
And we will be told the policy is working even though it is
clearly not.
And those of us who saw how wrong this all was can only
say "I told you so." But just like in Vietnam the
killing won't stop any time soon and it will tragically be
a long time before the day when helicopters airlift the last
Americans from the roof of the embassy. And even when that
happens the perpetrators won't accept the blame, they'll try
to blame Natalie Maines and Jacques Chirac.
But by then everyone will know better.
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