Before the invasion, I thought the Bushies were making too much noise for it to be factual. It things were called into serious question or even outright refuted, the Bushies didn't miss a beat change a word. Even in today's news, Dick Cheney is still asserting that Saddam had significant ties to al Qaida as if it hasn't been already refuted twelve ways to Sunday. As for weapons of mass destruction, I had already surmised that Saddam did not possess them in the quantities that the Bushies claimed.
Yet even I was mildly surprised in the first hours of the invasion when Saddam fired nothing more than four missiles in a pathetic display of strength (for want of a better word). It was at that moment I realized that Bush and his aides had outsmarted themselves:
Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. If he had them, he would have used at the moment the invading forces were most vulnerable: just before the balloon went up, while the forces were massed on the Kuwaiti frontier. That was when a few deadly weapons would work with maximum impact. Four missiles, inaccurate duds at that, was all he had.
Being a private citizen opposed to Bush (whom I saw as a dangerous usurper of power and still do) and his war (which I saw as nothing more than colonial piracy and still do), I had no interest or reason to go into denial about Bush and his aides. They weren't fooled by bad intelligence; they wanted the intelligence bad in order to fool the people. I knew this because, rather than rely on US corporate media for information, I was reading news online and saw
this in October 2002. That's Julian Borger in the
Guardian reporting in broad strokes about what Seymour Hersh in
The New Yorker would not give great details until after Bush pranced around the decks of the
Lincoln in his May Day costume. This was the first I knew about the OSP under Doug Feith. Since the Bushies were already acting like liars, the fact that intelligence was being politicized in this manner was no surprise to me.
For four and a half years, from the months prior to the war to the present, I have simply stuck to the same line: Bush and his people were lying and knew they were lying; the occupation will go badly because Bush and his aides don't give two bits about liberating the Iraqi people from a brutal tyrant but about liberating them from their mineral rights. In four and a half years, I have seen nothing to contradict those theses and everything that has come to light has supported them. That once they ousted Saddam they didn't know what the fuck to do next and still don't, well, that was an unpleasant surprise and still is.
However, had I been one of those fooled, or worse, had I been a member of Congress like Joe Lieberman or a journalist like Joe Klein who had misplaced my trust in Bush and his aides, it would have taken something more for me to have abandoned these rogues, something more to even see them as rogues.
Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their associates can take some small solace in that I didn't think the war was a good idea from the beginning. If I had thought otherwise, I might be more upset with them for mishandling post-war Iraq than I am. If I had thought there was anything positive to gain by invading Iraq, I would want them tarred and feathered. As it is, I want them only to be impeached and removed from office and then to face war crimes charges and get the kind of fair trial that is a human right, not the kind they give suspects in Guantánamo.
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