Current Events, Perspective

Peace, thy name is million

One Million Blogs for Peace has officially launched today, the fourth anniversary of the Iraq ‘war.’ Yours truly is one of the two-hundred seventeen inaugural blogs, or as the site refers to us the inblogurals.

Each Tuesday a special topic for discussion will be posted. This week’s is:

Think back four years ago, to when you first heard that the Iraq War had started.

Were you for or against the war at the time?

Against.

If you were for it, what has changed your mind over the last four years?

N/A

If you were against it, why were you against it?

In a word, contrived. There was such a stunning lack of international unity on the issue. Those who were with the United States were cobbled together. Beyond Great Britain, Australia, and Poland, the others seemed to be there only for the quid-pro-quo.

Even Poland, sadly, was not strong in that regard. The funny thing was that the quid-pro-quo was never completed. Poland was no better off for having participated. You know what they say about shaking hands with the devil, make sure you still have a hand afterward.

These days things don’t happen like that. We’ve moved beyond the stage where anyone with a brain believes the USA has all the secret data and the rest of the world is filled with bumbling secret agents (Inspector Jacques Clouseau style). If the threat were real no country and no leader in striking distance of Saddam’s weapons would have been reticent.

More than the contrived nature of the whole thing, any student of propaganda saw the run up. Us against the mean bad man… Those who are not with us are against us… Those crazy (ignorant, bumbling, disloyal, self interested, greedy, armpit hair wearning ) foreigners, especially the French… Iraq, half starved and poor (except for the elite) had the wherewithal to devastate the United States… The press jumping in with both feet – USA, USA, USA, like a hockey game…

My question would be, were people drunk when they took the government’s and the media’s word for it? Did people believe Colin Powell orating at the UN on this issue? He will forever be a sellout and requisite liar. He’s certainly smart enough not to have had the wool pulled over his eyes by President Bush etal.

The other word is smarmy. President Bush is smarmy. A poor businessman, a weak intellect, riding the crest of a family with money and power. Someone like President Reagan would have stayed on-point. Go after Al-Qaeda, hit them, do what needs doing to protect the US. The Bush administration used Al-Qaeda as a reason, once their initial reason fell apart, and the whole tie-in was, well, smarmy, self-serving, and irrelevant.

Now, here we are, thousands of our sons and daughters dead, tens of thousands physically and mentally destroyed (and those are just our citizens – magnify that by 10, 20, or 30 times for Iraqis), for a smarmy leader leading us into a contrived war.

Sad, regrettable, lowest point, waste… all words to describe what we have done. Mistake, as President Bush has said, is not one of those words. It was no mistake. It was intentional.