Marble Composition

Why Did We Invade Iraq?

That's a question I heard asked a while ago from sources on the Left, and I've never really heard a good answer to it from anyone who supports this war. That may because there really is no good answer. The one thing you learn about lying when you're young, that is if your parents didn't teach you, is that once you tell a lie, you need fifty other lies to cover up all of your previous tales. And then you need lies to cover for that crap too. If logic has any sway over you, you quickly realize what an excersize in futility at all becomes, and then you modify your behavior.

That's why, for the Bush administration anyway, once your "claims" get tested, by launching a pre-emptive war of course, there's no way to stuff the genie back into the bottle. So you go from the lies that we were told to "freedom is on the march", and the Flypaper Argument "we're fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here". That's some heavy lifting, and trust me, bullshit weighs a ton.

Here's the weird thing: I knew they were all lying to the American public. Before this whole fiasco started, I knew their claims about Iraq's nuclear programs were lies, and that Hussein's biological and chemical weapons efforts were completely moot. I had to dig a little bit, but the effort was really minimal. So, as I watched the cavalcade of administration officials and think-tanks wags make the rounds on all of the news shows, I thought to myself, there's no way they can pull this off. There's no way they can goad Congress into handing over the power to declare war.

For me, there was a stench in the air. I sat back and watched as the propaganda took over the airwaves. Shit, I even wrote my Senators, telling them I thought the whole thing was a fraud, from start to finish. And I'm talking about before the war started. They were congenial when they responded, but they had their minds made up. Militant fervor had taken over, and the facts as I knew them had nothing to do with the issue. Fear was in the air, and fear has more pull over a shaken population than I ever thought it could.

As I look back, I've always had one reason to oppose this war: it had nothing to do with PROTECTING THE SECURITY of our country. Hussein was a tin-pot fake, and Dick Cheney knew that from the start, no air force, no navy, old Russian-made tanks, a frail and fleeting infantry, no unconventional weapons, and two no-fly zones.

Some day, many years from now, someone will write a book explaining exactly why the Bush adminstration decided to invade Iraq. Maybe we'll get an answer then.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 8/11/2005 07:36:00 PM