BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX -- THE KOOL AID TABLE
LIKE JOAN CRAWFORD IN A ROSE GARDEN, CRANKY CLINTON TOOK AN AXE TO HER E-MAILS.
INCLUDING WHERE SHE'S DISCUSSING BENGHAZI WITH SYDNEY BLUMENTHAL.
CRANKY'S UNNATURAL ATTRACTION TO BLUMENTHAL MAY BURY HER YET.
REACHED FOR COMMENT, CRANKY INSISTED, "I DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH THAT MAN. MAINLY BECAUSE HE DID NOT WANT TO."
In yesterday's snapshot, we noted how, excepting former US Senator Mike Gravel, no US politician with a national presence tells the truth about Iraq.
They all tend to repeat the comforting lies about how the US 'helped' Iraq and how a 'gift' was given (at gun point) and it's always noble and wonderful -- on the side of the 'giver.' Very little attention is ever given to those that the 'gift' was imposed upon.
Damon Linker, non-politician, attempts to grapple, all these years later, with whether or not Bully Boy Bush and others lied about believing former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was sitting on Weapons of Mass Destruction. At The Week, Linker notes this belief (or stated 'belief') was held by many Democrats in the five or so years leading up to the Iraq War:
I read or listened in real time to most of the statements quoted in this useful Larry Elder column from 2006. Bill Clinton in 1998 and 2003; Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in February 1998; Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger in 1998; Rep. Nancy Pelosi in 1998; General Wesley Clark in 2002; Sen. John Rockefeller in 2002; French President Jacques Chirac in 2003 — all of them, and many more, expressed the overwhelming consensus of the Washington elite of both parties that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMD and that this made him a serious threat both to our allies in the region and the United States itself.
And Linker concludes:
Twelve years later, rather than doing the hard work of figuring out why so many Democrats (including the party's presumptive presidential nominee in 2016) made the unwise decision to support the invasion, liberals have decided to go easy on themselves by treating the Bush administration not as foolish but as sinister, conniving, evil. What a relief it must be to exonerate oneself from complicity in a catastrophic mistake by portraying oneself as an innocent victim of a diabolical plot.
It's an interesting column, one worth reading and I applaud the effort.
I started speaking out against the Iraq War publicly in February 2003 (one month before the war started).
To me, today's discussion is b.s.
Whether it's a little government monkey like Mike Morrell making statements that no one should believe or the continued other nonsense, it doesn't really matter.
I didn't base my objection on WMD being present or not being present.
Apparently, there are a lot of idiots or, in fairness, a lot of people who were silent when it mattered that now want to pretend they were brave.
Brave would never having been declaring that the Iraq War had to be fought or not fought based on WMDs.
WMDs couldn't be proven or disproven short of the United Nations weapons inspectors being allowed to do their job. (Bully Boy Bush did not allow them to do their job.)
I am never gong to build an argument around something I can't prove or disprove.
I don't know anyone in the early days against the war who was going around saying, "Saddam doesn't have WMDs!" I'm sure some people some where did that. But those of us that were speaking out -- especially on the college lecture circuit -- were not making that claim.
And I really find it dishonest that these Democratic partsians are today trying to pretend that WMD was the issue.
WMD was the side show.
I spoke out against the illegal war because it was illegal.
Just War theory didn't spring up in the last five days of 2002.
Its roots go back to Saint Augustine and Thomas of Aquin -- and even pre-date that if you pull in The Mahabharata. Centuries of legal theory, centuries of ethical exploration resulted in the Just War theory.
Bully Boy Bush was trashing that.
There is no go-it-alone justification unless you are attacked.
The US was not attacked by Iraq.
There was no legal justification to go to war with Iraq. There was no ethical justification.
What Bully Boy Bush did was upend the law, upend tradition and insist that there was a new justification for war: You could now legally go to war with a country because you suspected that at some point in the near or distant future they might decide to attack you.
There was no imminent threat nor was the US responding to an attack that had taken place.
The Iraq War was a war of choice.
The choice being made -- not by the people of America, not by the people of Iraq -- was going to have long lasting implications. For Iraq, the most immediate implication would be the tragedy of lives lost both during combat and in the immediate years following. For the US, it would mean our government was not just embracing its inner thug, it was now fondling its inner thug in public.
There would be no more efforts to pretend -- and there haven't been.
Libya?
We bombed it.
I beliee Hillary Clinton's argument is: We did it because we could.
There is no more pretense that the US government follows the law.
It just acts as a big bully doing whatever it wants.
Now the uni-polar system doesn't last for long.
In part, that's due to the fact that bullies breed hostility.
Whether a multi-polar system will come into being or a bi-polar system will return (Russia versus the US again?), something will take its place.
But WMD is nonsense and b.s.
And not noting how certain Republicans and Democrats felt that the uni-polar system meant the US could (and should) do whatever it wants?
I'm really not into stupidity.
I feel like I'm watching five-year-olds trying to explain rain.
Only with five-year-olds, they're cute.
There's nothing cute about adults basing arguments 12 years after the start of the Iraq War on whether or not it was known that Iraq had WMD before the Iraq War started.
When the US government was moving towards going to war on Iraq and doing so without even the cover of a United Nations authorization, when they were doing it with no attack from Iraq and no imminent attack, they were upending the rules of engagement and destroying the traditions that engagement were based upon.
Generally, when rulers act as the US government did in 2003, they're not seen well in history. Nazi Germany didn't feel the need to follow international law, didn't feel the need to embrace Just War theory.
The actions were criminal.
RECOMMENDED: "Iraq snapshot"
"Oh, Toni"
"Covers"
