Robert Scheer (Los Angeles Times): The Lies That Bind Us to Iraq

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Los Angeles Times via CommonDreams
Dated Tuesday February 3

The Lies That Bind Us to Iraq
Using the ends to justify the means repeats the folly of Vietnam.
By Robert Scheer

The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right and from the secular to the religious. It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists and on through the suicide bombers of today.

Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President Bush in justifying his preemptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush — misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations — are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago.

Once again we seem unwilling to fully grasp the lesson of Vietnam, our other major exercise in preemptive war based on the theories of ivory-tower intellectuals with dreams of a Pax Americana. For those requiring a refresher course in that previous folly, which so fractured our own country while devastating three others, check out the new documentary "The Fog of War," in which the Vietnam adventure's prime architect, Robert S. McNamara, tearfully concedes it was all a grand mistake.

Read more.

[indepat]

1. Barbara Tuchman also claimed America betrayed herself in Vietnam:

aren't those who do not learn from the past doomed to repeat those mistakes, thereby making this an even greater betrayal?