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Bush Wants Us to "Move On" --
So Why Not Take Him Up On It?
As Bush himself has suggested, whether his Administration gave true or false reasons for going to war is not the issue -- he blithely said "What's the difference?" The supposed biological and chemical weapons ready to be used on U.S. troops and delivered by drone planes to the U.S. mainland, the supposed nuclear bombs that could be detonated over American cities, the supposed close links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden -- all these constantly-repeated charges are, according to Bush, no longer worth discussing. "What's the difference?"
But to members of Congress and to us ordinary American citizens in the run-up to the war, those reasons -- delivered as proven facts by the likes of Cheney, Bush, Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld -- were accepted as genuine. Not only did it turn out that those assertions that took us to war were untrue, but now we're told that they don't really matter, anyway. According to Bush and his cronies, the war happened, Iraq is occupied, and it's time to "move on," nothing to see here, folks.
You see how the magic trick is performed. First, you make the war "inevitable," then you make the United Nations and other protesting agencies and allies "irrelevant" because, you see, the war is "inevitable." And then, once you've launched the war and got lots of people killed and maimed, then -- according to this non-logic -- it doesn't make any sense to keep debating the rightness or wrongness or morality or practicality of what you did. It's a done deal, and the U.S. citizenry needs to "move on."
This is the same Bush&Co. that, in true conservative fashion, talk endlessly about the need for folks to assume personal accountability and responsibility for their actions. (They're even pushing a "Personal Responsibility" bill right now, with regard to food-consumption.) But personal responsibility is for the other people, the little people. Bush never assumes responsibility for anything that goes wrong on his watch. If he's forced to admit that "mistakes were made" -- notice the intransitive language -- he'll find a scapegoat to take the hit.
As a matter of fact, as many have noted, the mantra of Bush's election campaign in 2004 appears to be: "It's not my fault." The economy is lagging, the Occupation is a deadly mess, millions of jobs have disappeared, the treasury is beset by humongous deficits -- all those may be in a terrible state, but, in Bush's view, I inherited the awfulness, you won't find my fingerprints on any of the murder weapons, let's just "move on."
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