The Iraq War

The Iraq War

The night of 9/11 we were watching television, and heard Wolf Blitzer of CNN declare definitively that it was the Arabs who had attacked the World Trade Centers.  And I knew we would eventually go to war.  We changed channels to ABC News, and Peter Jennings kept stating that it was unknown who had perpetrated the attacks.  And I knew we would eventually invade somewhere.

What was lost in most of the rhetoric that came after was the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, that had stated that the Project would not be able to be implemented unless the United States suffered another attack such as Pearl Harbor.  I suggest that one might want to Google this Project, and wade through its vast rhetoric.  One thing I am not saying is that George Bush was involved in planning the attacks of 9/11, but his basic incompetence certainly didn’t help in preventing such an attack.

Further, probably because of both my long years as a mother, and my 16 years in politics, I have a seventh sense in detecting when someone is lying.  My husband probably got pretty tired of me yelling at the TV that I could tell when Bush II was lying about weapons of mass destruction, or yellow cake in Niger, or denying the outing of Valerie Plame (covert CIA agent), among other lies.  He gets a really peculiar look when lying, and in the long term, I was correct.

Also, the absolute lies about Saddam Hussein throwing the nuclear weapons investigators out of the country were obvious.  They were pulled out because El Baradei was not finding any weapons of mass destruction, and since this was to be one of the reasons the Bush administration was creating to justify invading Iraq inspectors could not be left there.  Once the inspectors were out, the rhetoric was ratcheted up about Saddam lying about not having any weapons.  In the long term it was proven that there were never any, so how could Saddam prove that there were none when the plan was to accuse him of having them?  It was truly a Catch 22 for Saddam.  The US would not allow independent inspectors in to prove that there were none, and thus Saddam could not prove verbally that there were none since the US needed to prove that there were.  Saddam Hussein was a truly wicked man.  But try him for what he had actually done, not for what he hadn’t. 

So our war is over.  It should never have begun.  It was so horrible for the Iraqi civilians, to say nothing of our own service people who were sent over there to fight and for some to die.  Our service personnel and their families suffered through what they honestly believed was the right thing to do, and for that they truly need to be honored.