We invaded a country that we now know posed no threat to us and enjoyed no connection whatever to those who did. In order to do so, we pulled manpower and resources away from the job of protecting us and thereby made ourselves more vulnerable to the thousands of new enemies we created with our failed, dishonest invasion. OK, what next?
How about we go through the nation we profess to be liberating, arrest a whole bunch of innocent people and then torture them —raping a few here, killing a few there. What next? Well, what do you say we continue to this for a year after the Red Cross alerts us both to the fact of the torture as well as the innocence of ”70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year?”
I don’t know about you, but I’m having trouble understanding why, at minimum, the term “criminal negligence” is not being used here. If Rumsfeld really is responsible, and he says he is, then he should not merely be fired, but tried. I know it’s more than he’s willing to offer an American citizen like Jose Padilla but I’m in a generous mood. This being the Bush presidency, however, he is instead congratulated. “You are doing a superb job. You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude,” says the man who has just reached the lowest popularity point of his presidency. I fear Mr. Orwell is looking more and more pollyanish every day.
I do wonder what honest supporters of the war are telling themselves now. There was no threat. There was no planning for the occupation. We are hated by the people who we professed to liberate and we have destroyed our reputation in the Arab world we were pretending to teach a lesson about democracy. The Arab-Israeli peace process is in tatters and we are reduced to begging the very same United Nations we treated so contemptuously to bail us out of the mess we’ve created. In the meantime, Americans are in the hundreds are being killed a year after the president proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” and we have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to make neither ourselves nor the rest of the world any safer. David Brooks makes a tentative attempt to begin that process here, but unless he grapples with some of the truths on the other side of the page he’ll never get there.
What the hell do we do now? I don’t know, but The Center for American Progress at least, has a few ideas.
"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," the Oklahoma Republican said at a U.S. Senate hearing probing the scandal.
"These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations," Inhofe said. "If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."
...."I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying," he said.
As near as I can tell, Inhofe's only regret is that we went too easy on the guys at Abu Ghraib. And the Geneva Convention is for wussies.
