WW II vet: Every reason they gave for going to war was a lie or distortion

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.thnt.com/thnt/story/0,21282,910923,00.html

<snip>Among them was Sue Niederer of Hopewell, whose son, Army Lt. Seth Dvorin, was killed on Feb. 4 by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Niederer decried the inability of U.S. inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"We're the U.S. Our intelligence is supposed to be top-notch," she said. "What happened? What went wrong? Are we supposed to believe that Iraqi intelligence is better than ours? The regime is toppled and they still haven't found anything."

Gene Glazer of Bloomfield, a World War II veteran, questioned the Bush administration's motives for going to war.

"Every reason they gave for going to war was a lie or distortion," Glazer said. "We're already closing in on 600 dead. When does it end?"

more

[reprehensor]

1. Here's another WWII vet.

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/US-Patriots-Vidal2jun03.htm

Gore Vidal
We are the Patriots.

I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that's that. We won. And those who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity—Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last century—and I lived through three-quarters of it—we still held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once believed that I would see a great part of the nation—of we the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.

During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard. Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam, replied, "I had other priorities." Well, so did 12 million of us sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to fulfill.

So who's to blame? Us? Them? Well, we can safely blame certain oil and gas hustlers who have effectively hijacked the government from presidency to Congress to, most ominously, the judiciary. How did they do it? Curiously, the means have always been there. It took the higher greed and other interests to make this coup d'état work.

More at link.

[opihimoimoi]

2. Delusion allows the rejection of the obvious; Peace is better than war.

and if we do go to war, the result should be a better world, not a worse one.

This administration lied, distorted, and over looked common sense. we coulda waited.

But no. we just had to go into this war. Couldn't wait for the Irocky Horror Show to begin. Couldn't wait till the first one was finished. Osama still on the loose.

We just don't get it.... do we?

[Martin Eden]

3. Thank you for that link

I'm currently reading Dreaming War. Gore Vidal is a great man.