No Weapons of Mass Destruction. Last nite's big news was that the hunt for Saddam's supposed stockpiles of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" has been called off in failure. Today's New York Post, which is perhaps the Nation's most outspoken conservative cheerleader, was utterly silent on that story. It does not appear in nypost.com's front-page screen of "World News" stories. It does not appear in the list of "Breaking International News" stories. It does not appear in the "Breaking News" section at the top right of the opening screen. There is no editorial nor op-ed piece about it. Nor did any mention of it appear yesterday.
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It would seem that the New York Post doesn't want its readers to know or think about the fact that the sole reason ordinary Americans were willing to break from our history and launch an attack upon a country that had never attacked us was at best a terrible, horrible mistake, and at worst an evil, cynical lie. But all decent people must know and think about that fact.
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David Kay, whom CNN.com has described as the "[f]ormer top U.S. weapons inspector", appeared on TV last nite to say that the final report of the searchers confirms his group's earlier finding that Saddam had long ago desisted from pursuing a program to develop WMD. ABC News showed President Bush saying to Barbara Walters (in an interview to be broadcast in its entirety tomorrow nite) that it doesn't matter that there were NEVER any WMD that the U.S. 'had' to invade Iraq to destroy because they posed an 'imminent danger' to the United States. "Saddam was a threat" to the world, Dubya continues to assert, and it doesn't matter that the premise upon which Dubya sold us a U.S. invasion was false.
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Oh?
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George Bush says it doesn't matter that the American people were tricked into destroying our reputation in the world as an enemy of aggression, slow to anger and willing to attack only after being attacked ourselves.
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It doesn't matter that we defied the international community, supposedly to enforce United Nations resolutions that the UN itself wasn't ready to go to war to enforce and which, it turns out, had already been complied with! — as Saddam said all along they had been complied with!
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It doesn't matter that we destroyed schools and roads and bridges and airports and telephone systems and sewage treatment plants and water supply systems and TV stations and radio stations and hospitals in invading a country that had never attacked us and had no plans nor ability to attack us.
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It doesn't matter that we may have killed 100,000 Iraqis, innocent soldiers merely trying to defend their "homeland" against a vicious foreign invader, and noncombatant women and children killed as "collateral damage", both in the initial attack and in the ensuing occupation.
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It doesn't matter that we have sent over 150,000 different Americans "into harm's way" in a war of aggression and militarist occupation that has to date killed 1,361 of them plus 160 members of other "coalition" forces. The grief that their families and friends suffered doesn't matter. Nor does it matter that over 10,500 Americans have been wounded but not killed in the war, nor that some of them will be left with serious disabilities, for life, from this war. Nor that 150,000 Americans are still in Iraq, still in harm's way, even after the Weapons of Mass Destruction they were sent in to find and destroy turn out never to have existed. We won't even mention the disruption to tens of thousands of companies whose National Guard employees were taken from their jobs to be shipped overseas.
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It doesn't matter that this war has cost us well over $100 billion (due to reach $152 billion by the end of this month and perhaps as high as $200 billion by the end of this year), essentially all of it borrowed, from the rich, in the form of deficit spending. Where's the money coming from? It comes, obviously, from higher taxes than we would otherwise have had to pay. And those tax moneys are not available for our own needs, from police protection to firefighting to education to economic development, job retraining, housing, roads, dams, bridges, ANYTHING productive. Almost all the interest to be paid on that debt will go to the rich. So poor and middle-class Americans must pay higher taxes to cover the interest on Dubya's war debt, in a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich.
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It doesn't matter that some 10 or more Iraqis a day — and sometimes 50 a day, the equivalent of 600 Americans a day being killed here at home — are killed in terrorist attacks that could never have happened under Saddam. Nor that destruction of oil facilities and disruptions to the flow of oil, Iraq's only export of value, have cost that defeated and depressed people $10 billion they cannot afford, $10 billion that goes only to repairing damage that could not have happened under Saddam.
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It doesn't matter that Iraqis are at each other's throats, and a country that Saddam held together may explode into civil war. Will the U.S. stay and fite all sides if such a war erupts? Or will we run home and disown the chaos we have caused?
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George Bush says that none of the massive death and destruction his war has caused, and continues to cause — to our reputation as a Nation devoted to peace and justice not least — matters. Nor does the fact that the only reason that persuaded Americans to embark upon this unprovoked war of aggression (that we could be attacked at any moment by Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction) was a mistake — or, far more likely, an outrite, cynical lie — matter either.
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In lite of all this, I have just one question: What, Mr. President, does matter?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:52 PM