Well, it's official. The White House quietly announced last week that Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group has packed it in, giving up the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Remember them? They were the huge pile of terrible weapons which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others assured us repeatedly and apocalyptically just had to exist and were doubtlessly going to be used against us.
You may recall Duelfer's preliminary report back in October that Iraq's WMD arsenal was actually destroyed more than a decade ago. As this was not what the White House wanted to hear, the report was buried and the ISG sent back into the field. Of course, now that the election is safely in the past, it doesn't really matter what they report -- from the Administration's standpoint, anyway. From the standpoint of the people whose loved ones have been killed in this splendid little war, it matters a whole lot.
Almost two years have passed since we invaded Iraq, and while we've managed to kill an awful lot of people, turn the rest of the world against us and bog ourselves down in a desert quagmire, no weapons have ever been found. The last-ditch hope from invasion supporters is that Saddam smuggled his WND stockpiles to other countries before the war, but there is no evidence of such a move.
Other justifications for the invasion have likewise disintegrated, from Saddam Hussein's alleged al Qaeda connections to those unmanned poison-spraying drones which didn't work and couldn't do what they were alleged to even if they did work. The sole remaining excuse is the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyranny, but the Iraqi people themselves don't seem terribly pleased to be the hosts of an indefinite American occupation force, especially one which promised the moon and then didn't even deliver green cheese.
For his part, Bush told ABC that he has "no regrets" over his invasion obsession, still insisting that the Iraq War is on track and has made the world a safer place. This shows a denial of reality of such staggering proportions that one has to wonder whether he is living in a dream world.
Perhaps he is. It was recently reported that Bush ordered his aides not to bring him any "bad news" on Iraq and only tell him the good stuff. Combine this with his infamous remark that he never bothers to get the news by himself and you have a perfect example of a child monarch, kept blissfully ignorant by his scheming advisers.
He also told the Washington Post that he sees his re-election squeaker as a complete vindication of his disastrous Iraq policies, therefore no one will be held accountable for anything Iraq-related, from the twisting of pre-war intelligence to justify an already-made decision, to the rejection of any sort of post-war planning beyond flowers-in-the-streets wishful thinking.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who overruled his military generals on required force levels and only last month told front-line troops to stop whining about chronic armor shortages, will keep his job. So will Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who cherry-picked raw intelligence data to manufacture a nonexistent Iraq-al Qaeda link. Ditto for Vice President Dick Cheney, who kept on referring to fictional Iraqi nuclear programs and imaginary Prague meetings long after both were firmly disproved. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who invoked images of phantom mushroom clouds and tried covering up the pre-9/11 intelligence briefing warning of an al Qaeda plot, is actually getting a promotion to Secretary of State. (Colin Powell, the current holder of that job, was pushed aside and finally pushed out entirely for insufficient cheerleading.) And White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who perverted law and morality to justify torturing prisoners in Cuba and Iraq, is likewise being advanced to Attorney General.
Tom Lehrer once famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger, one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War, won the Nobel Peace Prize. That thin scream you hear is satire dying another death. How on Earth can one satirize a President so firmly convinced that up is down and black is white? Where is the humor in an Administration which rewards pleasant lies while punishing unpleasant truths?
The only thing preventing total despair is one bright spot: the imminent-disaster fear campaign used so successfully in manipulating us into supporting the Iraq War doesn't seem to be working so well in scaring up support for gutting Social Security. A leaked memo written by one of Karl Rove's aides, bragging about how the neoconservatives who have hated the program since the day it was created finally have a chance to destroy it, provides a window into the inner workings of the White House's thought processes. Numerical analyses showing how such privatization would make the national debt skyrocket beyond all control didn't help, and even some Republicans are backing away from the plan.
The ISG has now officially admitted to reality. But it seems President Bush and his inner circle never will. And the more they try to hide their heads in the sands, the longer this stupid and pointless war will continue, and the more American soldiers will come home in body bags.
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