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• Friday, December 5, 2008 01:42 PM

  @Mark Denney 2

  Mark Denney: "They used what they thought were necessary means to gain intelligence from captives in this war and ignored sound advice from seasoned professionals from beginning to end in how to execute this war, how to deal with the aftermath, and how to gain information from captives."

  I am glad you are seeing this...

  Mark Denney: "I think everyone feared saddam having and using chemical weapons."

  Really? I don't think so at all. There was no tangible intelligence showing that Saddam Hussein was up to anything nefarious or that he had accelerated military activities. Every single thing in Colin Powell's speech to the UN has been debunked. Every. Single. Thing.

  Sure, if somebody tells you your enemy might have chemical weapons that will melt your face off, and you're stuck in a desert full of people who might want to kill you, you're going to be full of all sorts of fears -- fear of guns, chemicals, bombs, camels, spicy foods....

  Mark Denney: "Trust me, no one WANTS to wear chem gear and do anything except sit still. That alone to me is evidence that information existed that he had them and he did nothing to change that."

  Whoa, that's quite a leap there in the 2nd sentence above. WHAT is evidence that information existed? That people had fear?

  Mark Denney: "But, as a human being, I am glad we decided to act and take out saddam."

  That is a weird statement: "As a human being." All this time I thought I was writing to a panda!

  No, really, what does it mean, "as a human being"? Does being a human being make you happy to see a man's sons killed, sliced up, and then lathered with facial makeup, photographed, and their photographs air-dropped onto cities to demoralize people? Does being a human being make you happy to see a man put into a show trial in a kangaroo court, convicted, and then led up the stairs to be hung from the neck, and then repeatedly stabbed afterward?

  Does being a human being make it worthwhile to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people just so that one man can be punished?

  Hundreds of thousands of people...

  What was your human reaction to the little boy who lost both arms and both legs due to an errant U.S. bomb?

  What was your human reaction to the pregnant woman shot multiple times by U.S. soldiers who didn't realize the car approaching them was trying to get to a hospital as she went into labor?

  What was your human reaction to the teenagers gleefully thrown off a bridge by U.S. soldiers, breaking their legs and then drowning?

  Or the human reaction to an innocent taxi driver, rounded up, taken to an interrogation room, and beaten so many times in the legs (mostly to get him to stop crying) that the coagulation in his arteries caused his heart to fail?

  What is the human reaction to wave after wave of suicide bombings in public markets as a result of the chaos unleashed due to shoddy post-war planning?

  What is the human reaction to Abu Ghraib prisoners forced to wallow naked in their excrement, pretend to jack each other off, and stand in "stress positions" for hours at a time, sleep-deprived, with electrodes connected to their hands or genitalia?

  You must have a lot of human reactions. Let's hear them. I mean, sure, it's good that Saddam Hussein is out of power. He was always a mobster-like cretin.

  But this is a bigger picture than just "Saddam Hussein was BAD and taking him out was GOOD." We are worlds beyond that now.

  We're looking at the displacement of 5 or 10 million people or more, the likely deaths of 500,000 to a million others, the complete gutting of the entire U.S. economy, over 5,000 U.S. personnel dead and probably 50,000 or more seriously, seriously disfigured.

  Mark Denney: "I am extremely dissapointed with how we did it but I think we took action when no one else would and I think Bush deserves some credit for that. Not much else but, he tried..."

  Bush has already been given credit, from millions of Americans who have lavished praise on him after the war, and who voted for him in 2004. That's about all the credit he deserves. After that, what did Bush do that was worth credit? He failed to live up to American ideals. Instead of owning up to the problems of the Iraq war, he consistently side-stepped them. He never took responsibility for the U.S. torture policy that came all the from the top -- even as he claimed "we do not torture."

  I don't even think Bush deserves credit, for anything. Going to war? That doesn't take courage on his part. He didn't have to put himself in danger. He just had to convince himself it was a good thing to do, facts and circumstances be damned. And that's the problem -- it is well-documented that Bush never actually read intelligence reports and briefings that were delivered to him on important, key matters. He let the people around him do that, and then he asked for their interpretations. Bush was disengaged from all the details. He didn't care enough to learn about the very people he was sending young soldiers in to attack. What credit does he really deserve?

  —Xrandadu Hutman Read Xrandadu Hutman's other letters
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