Categories
Social & Political

Nada: No truth, no lessons learned

<![CDATA[The reason for the war in Iraq—weapons of mass destruction—was fiction and now the Bush Administration has ended the hunt for WMDs without acknowledging it lied. Surely, if there were no WMD and Saddam was contained, as he very clearly was based on Iraq’s total inability to defend itself, the lives of 1,361 U.S. troops […]

<![CDATA[The reason for the war in Iraq—weapons of mass destruction—was fiction and now the Bush Administration has ended the hunt for WMDs without acknowledging it lied. Surely, if there were no WMD and Saddam was contained, as he very clearly was based on Iraq’s total inability to defend itself, the lives of 1,361 U.S. troops and 160 coalition troops lost in Iraq, as well as the 10,252 wounded U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead and wounded are too high a price to have paid in order to have elections in a country that are not fully representative of those who want to vote.
Ongoing containment, improving the flow of food-for-oil moneys to the Iraqi people, would have been a far more successful program in 2003 than the war. Instead of creating a hotbed of terror recruitment—a playground for terrorists, too—the U.S. might have given the Iraqi people the wherewithal to stand up to and depose their dictator peacefully or, at least, without the massive casualties ordinary Iraqis have endured and only see rising.
But we have an administration incapable from learning either from the past (Vietnamization was a tragic program) or its own experience (the Bush message on Iraq is “all success all the time”) that is bent on reducing American liberties in the face of more and more manufactured crises.]]>