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• Friday, December 5, 2008 01:42 PM

  @Mark Denney

  Mark Denney: "You see a war that never should have been. ... In your view this was a crime from top to bottom and Bush, as the commander in chief, should bear the brunt of the responsibility for this crime and be punished accordingly. Is that right?"

  That about sums it up, but it also just scratches the surface. I am not anti-war. I am against the level of lies that surrounded this war, the incompetence of the entire operation, the excessive marketing used, the over-control of information (and misinformatin), the manipulation of the public and of the public's fear, the corruption of how contracts were awarded, the outrageously unchecked raiding of public coffers, the utter and depraved indifference of our approach to the citizens of Iraq, and the subsequent high-level cover up and denial of every single thing that was revealed to be wrong.

  And that doesn't even really cover it...

  Mark Denney: "For me, saddam had flouted international law for over a decade including the use of illegal weapons while he murdered and tortured his own people."

  Sorry, but this really is an incredibly simplistic and willfully one-sided interpretation of events. Your base statement is true. Your avoidance of context is the problem.

  The idea that Saddam Hussein "flouted international law for over a decade" is pretty funny when you consider all the other countries that have flouted international law. Chief among them is the United States. Undoubtedly Hussein was a massive thorn in the side of everybody, and undoubtedly he deserved a demise. But he was a tin-pot dictator, a nothing. We wiped out his military in the first Gulf War and he never regained that level of power -- he was completely hemmed in.

  Hussein's use of illegal weapons occurred in the early 1990s. Most of his most vile actions happened before and after the first Gulf War. We didn't invade Iraq because of stuff he did a decade earlier, and it is silly to keep using that as a justification.

  No doubt Saddam's continued gaming of the system was a problem. But there were any number of possible solutions. War was not the only option. Attacking, invading and occupying Iraq was the equivalent of using a baseball bat to kill a cockroach that's sitting on a cupboard full of dishware.

  And again, there's no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. None. Not even a policy change can justify a magical connection. Iraq was something that the Neocons were licking their chops about long, long before 9/11. 9/11 was used as an excuse -- it wasn't the result of some sort of political soul-searching. It was considered an opportunity, not a necessity. "How can we convince the public that we should invade Iraq?" was the long-standing question. 9/11 became the answer.

  Another famous quote, said by Goring during his trial in Nuremberg, follows:

  "Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

  --Hermann Goring, Nuremberg trials

  Mark Denney: "They used specious hard intelligence and fear mongering to sell this war and carried it out in the face of international objections."

  Glad to see you admit this much. The intelligence WAS specious, and many, many people knew it before the invasion. This is not a "hindsight" conclusion -- people were speaking out against the rationale AT THE TIME.

  And yes, the war was conducted in the face of international objections, which is a very important factor to consider. Bush decided, essentially, to "go it alone," and the inclusion of Britain and the "Coalition of the Bought Off" doesn't mitigate that.

  Now, if you take a country and dictator whose been a problem for the entire international community, and you decide to solve the problem once and for all, do you find a solution that makes sure the international community is on board, or do you tell most of the international community to go screw themselves and jump in headlong with minimal preparation or planning, just because you see a springtime window of opportunity that's about to close, and you don't want to wait until fall?

  —Xrandadu Hutman Read Xrandadu Hutman's other letters
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