Enough is Enough is Enough

Enough is Enough is Enough

What a time we live in. Sometimes I think I am in the middle of a large insane asylum. And, after a while, I begin to wonder if I am the one that is crazy. What to do in a world turned upside down? Where to begin?

Iraq. Let’s take Iraq. That’s as good a place as any to begin.

Hillary Clinton said that she was duped by the administration. Hillary Clinton said she didn’t know better. The government misrepresented the facts. She’s not original of course. Lots of folks have said that they were misled. Enough of that.

Now I don’t care about or for Hilary Clinton. I don’t even really know who she is. Does anybody? She’s a caricature of the opportunistic politician without any visible principles or integrity—just a sense of what will get votes. Take her recent co-sponsorship of a constitutional amendment prohibiting flag burning. You can almost see the bean crunchers in the Clinton campaign counting how many right wing votes Hillary would harvest with that one. But this claim of ignorance about Iraq is the last straw.

Back in 2003 the facts were there for all who took the time to see them. Take Scott Ritter. He had been the United States weapons inspector in Iraq. No friend of Saddam Hussein, Ritter was among those forced to leave. It was clear said Ritter again and again and again that Iraq could not possibly have had weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi military capability had been devastated in the war of the first Bush. Then there was Lieutenant-General Brent Scowcroft, U.S. National Security Advisor under Presidents Ford and G.H.W. Bush. Scowcroft strongly opposed a war against Iraq. He stated that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—another one of the Administration’s arguments for attacking Iraq. Or there was Hans Blix, Chief United Nations weapons inspector who, in 2002, presided over the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission which found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This was public information. This was information that I was able to access at the time. In fact, every single reason that the Bush-Cheney White House gave for the invasion of Iraq was false and could be shown to be false before Congress voted to give the president the power of war. There were no weapons of mass destruction, nor was there any capability of producing them. There was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, they despised each other. Thus there was absolutely no connection between Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center. The entire justification for invading Iraq was a tissue of lies.

Hillary Clinton and the Congress of the United States swallowed these lies with almost no resistance in 2003 and authorized the president to wage war against a country that did not threaten the United States. This is certainly criminal under the provisions of international law to say nothing of the United Nations' charter.

I am sick and tired of hearing about faulty intelligence. Anyone who cared to look carefully at that time could see that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were twisting arms and sliming opponents to get “information” that would support their position. The "Downing Street Memo” illustrated this as did the testimony of former CIA officers. While one can understand that, given our educational system, people are not trained to think for themselves, the members of Congress have a minimal responsibility to ascertain facts before authorizing war. Or is that too radical a position

That the media collaborated in the lies simply makes the scandal more reprehensible. The complicity of The New York Times with its story tellers like Judith Miller weaving fairy tales of aluminum tubes and big bombs is a disgraceful blot on the record of American journalism—such as it has become.

In 1898 the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, sent the artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to draw pictures of the insurrection.. Remington got to Cuba and cabled Hearst, “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst cabled back, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war”. And so he did. Hearst lives on in our media and our government. Who cares if it’s true if it sells?

It’s a hoax. It’s a ghastly, grisly hoax. The reasons for a war are fabricated. Or, to be less polite, they are lies. It’s incredible that these lies have taken four years to unravel.

There’s another way to put it. The war in Iraq is a crime. It’s a crime against the men, women and children of Iraq. It’s a crime against the American men and women who are sent there to be killed or maimed. And those who continue to authorize this crime are criminals. It’s that simple.

All this talk about how the United States should have done better is totally beside the point. And talk about how the United States now should do it better is absurd. There is only one way for the United States to do better in Iraq and that is to leave—NOW.

There is no way to render an abomination pleasing. A criminal war is a criminal war. There is no way to make it more polite, more palatable, more refined. Congressional Democrats with your good old boy good will take heed. It’s a crime and the perpetrators of this crime—George Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and those who led us into this—are war criminals. And impeachment is off the table??!! Lying about a blow job is a greater crime than orchestrating the deaths of thousand upon thousands? Who’s crazy?

This is about people—human beings. It is about men, women and children who have been killed or maimed because of the United States attack and war upon Iraq. Last October the Lancet, the British medical journal, estimated that between 426,000 and 793,000 Iraqis had been killed from the time the United States invaded until July 2006. If one were to project that number proportionally upon the United States that would amount to ten million Americans. Ten million American casualties. Can you imagine that? At least a million Iraqis are refugees in their own country. That would translate to twenty million Americans. Think of ten million Americans killed and twenty million others wandering homeless around this country.

As for U.S. troops, the president of this country has already sacrificed more Americans in Iraq than Osama bin Laden killed in the Twin Towers. Who’s crazy?

And now the Vice President of this country, the man who twisted the information about Iraq in 2002, is touring the world beating the drums against Iran. Once again unsubstantiated reports (rejected by U.S. Army officers) are brought forth to implicate Iran in the death of U.S. soldiers. Let us bring this lunatic home. The only debatable issue here is whether he should be impeached or tried as a war criminal. But we need not collude any longer in the delusions of madmen.

What about people? There are children who are blown up. What did they do? There are fathers who leave widows and orphans. There are women who leave motherless children. These are not statistics. They are living human beings as divine as any of us with every right to live and flourish. What right does this government have to turn a country into hell and destroy its citizenry?

It’s obscene that this Congress can’t even debate a non binding resolution to end the war. Well, we do not need non binding resolutions. We need to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq with all deliberate speed.

We do not need discussions on how better to arrange American troops in Iraq. We need to bring those troops home. We do not need to bolster U.S. forces there. We need to remove them.

At the time of writing, the Congress is poised to grant the administration one hundred billion dollars to continue the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democratic party leaders claim that they oppose the war but don’t want to undermine our troops and put them in harm’s way.

Let’s forget about logic folks. But how can you fund a war that you oppose? Or, as one of the few sane senate voices, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, put it, cutting funding doesn’t leave the troops stranded. It brings them back home. He was echoed by a Marine sergeant who pointed out the absurdity of maintaining an opposition to a war that you finance. But, hey, logic has very little to do with it. Neither does sanity. Look at Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia supporting a filibuster to his own bill. As for the Democrats they are, once again, buckling under when the word “unpatriotic” is in the air. Does this sound familiar? Happened with the Vietnam War. Happened during the McCarthy period.

The Democrats in Congress won on the issue of the war in Iraq. By and large they are being ever so polite. Impeachment off the table? I think not. This is not a time for politeness but for scathing rebuke.

This country can no longer support the hell that it has created. Every second that we allow this war to continue diminishes our own humanity. Our representatives and, particularly, our senators must hear this. Let Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and the others put their ears to a thunder in the ground. Let them put their political fingers to a whirlwind. Let them feel a storm. They are our servants. We are not theirs. Enough is enough.