I think I’m gonna go with what Dennis Kucinich said:
As Iraq descends into chaos again, more than a decade after “Mission Accomplished,” media commentators and politicians have mostly agreed upon calling the war a “mistake.” But the “mistake” rhetoric is the language of denial, not contrition: it minimizes the Iraq War’s disastrous consequences, removes blame, and deprives Americans of any chance to learn from our generation’s foreign policy disaster.
The Iraq War was not a “mistake” — it resulted from calculated deception. The painful, unvarnished fact is that we were lied to. Now is the time to have the willingness to say that.
In fact, the truth about Iraq was widely available, but it was ignored. There were no WMD. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war wasn’t about liberating the Iraqi people. I said this in Congress in 2002. Millions of people who marched in America in protest of the war knew the truth, but were maligned by members of both parties for opposing the president in a time of war — and even leveled with the spurious charge of “not supporting the troops.”
I’ve written and spoken widely about this topic, so today I offer two ways we can begin to address our role:
1) President Obama must tell us the truth about Iraq and the false scenario that caused us to go to war.
When Obama took office in 2008, he announced that his administration would not investigate or prosecute the architects of the Iraq War. Essentially, he suspended public debate about the war. That may have felt good in the short term for those who wanted to move on, but when you’re talking about a war initiated through lies, bygones can’t be bygones.
The unwillingness to confront the truth about the Iraq War has induced a form of amnesia which is hazardous to our nation’s health. Willful forgetting doesn’t heal, it opens the door to more lying. As today’s debate ensues about new potential military “solutions” to stem violence in Iraq, let’s remember how and why we intervened in Iraq in 2003.
2) Journalists and media commentators should stop giving inordinate air and print time to people who were either utterly wrong in their support of the war or willful in their calculations to make war.
By and large, our Fourth Estate accepted uncritically the imperative for war described by top administration officials and congressional leaders. The media fanned the flames of war by not giving adequate coverage to the arguments against military intervention.
He’s right about everything, of course, but he doesn’t mention one important factor. The lying was hugely popular. People were heavily into the Rah-rah-boom-my-country-right-or-wrong. A lot of people were having a high old time being lied to. As the conman said, you can’t be conned unless you want to be.
Even Kucinich isn’t talking about that problem. (I’ll cut him some slack. He’s a politician. He can’t tell the voters things they don’t want to hear.) Until people stop lying to themselves, though, why would anyone else stop?
I know that before the Shrublet committed troops, the country was about 50-50 on the going to war business. After he committed was when the Rah-rah crap really started. The point I’m trying to make is that they then embraced it enthusiastically. Just because the bamboozling ratchets up is no reason to start helping it along.
This piece is absolutely on target. Unfortunately, the rock bottom last thing we can expect from the 24-7 propaganda channels is ‘The Truth about Iraq.’ I’m still waiting for any of the talking heads to begin their questioning of Bush the Lesser, Cheney, Rice or any of that crime family with, “when you lied the country into going to war in Iraq . . .”
I’ll give “everyday people” a pass on this. They trust that their “leaders” are going to shoot straight. Trusting anybody in a position of authority is a big mistake. People do trust because that’s the way our school system tells us we must operate. FOX and all Republican elected officials are propagandists. They lie. Karl Rove and Roger Ailes learned well at the feet of Joseph Goebbels. The truth is that we have all been lied to about every needless war that we’ve ever fought throughout history. And they have all been needless.