No WMDs after all, no excuse for war

[Patrick M]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... =printable

BushCo Reams Nation Good
No WMDs after all, no excuse for war, too late for anyone to care anymore. Ha-ha, suckers
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

Ha-ha-ha oh man did we ever get smacked on that one. Conned big time. Punk'd like dogs. Just gotta shake your head, laugh it off. They reamed us but good, baby! Damn.

Turns out it really was all a big joke after all. The war, that is. All a big fat nasty murderous oil-licking lie, a sneaky little power-mad game with you as the sucker and the world as the pawn and BushCo as the slithery war thug, the dungeon master, the prison daddy. You really have to laugh. Because it's just so wonderfully ridiculous. In a rather disgusting, soul-draining sort of way.

See, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No WMDs at all. Isn't that great? What's more: There never were. Ha-ha-ha. Gotcha!

No warehouses teeming with nuclear warheads, no underground bunkers packed with vats of boiling biotoxins, no drums of crazy-ass chemical agents that will melt your skin and turn us all into drooling flesh-eating zombies -- unless, of course, you count the sneering vat of conservative biotoxin that is, say, Fox News, in which case, hell yeah baby, we gotcher WMDs right here beeyatch.

Go figure. Those lowly U.N. inspectors were right after all. Who knew? It was all a ruse. We've been sucker-punched and ideologically molested and patriotically sodomized and hey, what the hell, who cares anyway, we "liberated" an oppressed people most Americans secretly loathe and fear and don't understand in the slightest, even though that was never the point, or the justification, or the goal. Go team.

But wait, is liberation of a brutalized and tormented people now the reason? The justification for our thuggery? That is so cool! So that means we're going to blow the living crap out of Sri Lanka and Sudan and Tibet and North Korea and about 47 others, right? Right? Maybe Saudi Arabia, too, second only to the Talilban itself in its abuse of women? Cool! As if.

Ah, but screw the liberal whiny peacenik U.N. inspectors, right? Let's ask the U.S. search teams themselves, ShrubCo's own squadrons of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts and Special Forces troops who've been in Iraq for weeks now, searching frantically.

Surely they've found something, right? Surely we can now prove that Saddam was fully intending to fillet our babies and annihilate Florida and poke the eyes out of really cute kittens on national TV for sadistic pleasure, right? Gimme a hell yeah!

Whoops. Bad news. As The Washington Post reports, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, the very serious-minded group heading up all U.S. inspections in Iraq, the group absolutely certain it would immediately find steaming neon-lit stockpiles of WMDs piled right next to Saddam's personal stash of gay porn and Britney Spears posters and opium pipes, is coming home with its tail between its legs. Found nothing. Nada.

Psychopatriots are a little nonplussed. Bush is merely "embarrassed." Peace advocates are sighing and drinking heavily. We have done this ghastly horrible inane hate-filled entirely unprovoked thing in the name of power and petroleum and military contracts and strategic empire building, our nation is numb and more bitterly divisive than ever and our leaders are not the slightest bit ashamed.

But of course you're not the slightest bit shocked. You knew it all along. The WMD line was just a ploy that, tragically, much of the nation bought into like a sucker pyramid scheme after being pounded into submission with hammers of fear and Ashcroftian threats and bogus Orange Alerts and having their tweezers confiscated at the airport.

And of course the capacity to be outraged and appalled has been entirely drained out of you, out of this nation, replaced by raging ennui and sad resentment and the new fall season on NBC. This is what they're counting on. Your short attention span. WMDs? That's so, like, last February. Hey look, the swimsuit model won "Survivor"!

Because now it's all done. Like a bad trip to the dentist where your routine cleaning turned out to be a bloody excruciating root canal and 50 hours of high-pitched drilling and $100 billion in god-awful cosmetic surgery, now the bandages come off. Smile, sucker. We're at peace once again. Sort of. But not really. Don't you feel better now? No? Too bad. No one cares what you think.

It's all over but the shouting. And the screaming. And the endless years of U.S. occupation in the Middle East, the quiet building of U.S. military bases in Iraq so we can keep those uppity bitches Syria and Egypt and Lebanon in line, forge ahead with the long-standing plan to strong-arm those damn Islamic nuts into brutal compliance with Bushco's bleak blueprint for World Inc. What, too bitter? Hardly.

Should we care that Osama, the actual perp of 9/11, is still running around free? That terrorism hasn't been quelled in the slightest? That the Mideast is more of a U.S.-hating powder keg than ever, thanks to BushCo? That the economy is in the worst shape it's been in decades?

Should we care that we just massacred tens of thousands of Iraqi (and Afghani) civilians and soldiers and suffered a little more than 100 U.S. casualties and have absolutely nothing to show for it except bogus force-fed pride and this weird, sickening sense that we just executed something irreparable and ungodly and karmically poisonous?

Nah. Just laugh it off. Have a glass of wine, make love, go play Frisbee with the dog. Breathe deep and focus on what's truly important and try to assimilate this latest atrocity into your backstabbed worldview, add it to the list of this lifetime's spiritual humiliations, as you wait for the next barrage, the imminent announcement that we're about to do it all again.

Steel yourself. Protect your soul. Because man, they reamed us good. Slammed this nation like a bad joke. Gotcha! Ha-ha-ha.
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©2003 SF Gate

[balthazar]

no underground bunkers packed with vats of boiling biotoxins

Boiling biotoxins would seem pretty counterproductive, wouldn't it?

Oh, but wait, I forgot! This is an op/ed piece! From a guy in San Francisco! Who's probably so liberal he makes Michael Moore look like Pat Buchanan!

[lukpac]

That would be impressive.

[Rspaight]

Boiling biotoxins would seem pretty counterproductive, wouldn't it?

Oh, but wait, I forgot! This is an op/ed piece! From a guy in San Francisco! Who's probably so liberal he makes Michael Moore look like Pat Buchanan!

Lambasting liberal-leaning lefties whose lone liability is lapse-filled alliteration leads to light-headed logic.

Ryan

[balthazar]

It's hard to even think about taking this guy seriously when all he seems capable of is writing empty, highly subjective prose.

I, for one, would have appreciated a more honest presentation from "BushCo," but honest politics was tried in Minnesota (Jesse Ventura) and they didn't seem to like it. It seems like a lot of people would rather be hoodwinked.

[Ron]

Let's say for the sake of argument that it was a Democratic president who mislead the American people and waged war for other than the stated reasons. Republicans would be jumping outta their socks pissed off carrying signs like "Won't Get Fooled Again" in the run-up to the next presidential election.

In the current case, Democratic presidential candidates won't make much of it because they're fairies and scared to death of the "T" word [traitor]. Bush has committed what *should be* political suicide. Most voters don't seem to care, though.

Speaking of Iraq, I've noticed where American soldiers are now permitted to kill looters. Ah, but who cares. It's just a bunch of dumb-ass ignorant Iraqis.

[balthazar]

Speaking of Iraq, I've noticed where American soldiers are now permitted to kill looters. Ah, but who cares. It's just a bunch of dumb-ass ignorant Iraqis.

I hear now that that may not have been the case.

Regardless of the Iraq situation, I'm not sure Bush would have been elected anyway due to the happenings of the 2000 election, not what's happened over two years later. I'm not sure I can so clearly state how the war in Irag changes that.

[Grant]

The jury is still out on if they had WMDs. Let's see if what Dr. Germ says panns out.

I have always maintianed that if Saddam did have these weapons, he was still of no threat to us. Radical Islamic factions and North Korea are still a bigger threat.

[Matt]

Maybe the weapons are hidden under these:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... May13.html

Wow, there really was no reason for a war. Not even a moral obligation. What a nice guy Saddam was! Gosh we were so mislead.

[Ron]

Wow, there really was no reason for a war. Not even a moral obligation. What a nice guy Saddam was! Gosh we were so mislead.

Matt, you've missed the point. The war was fought ostensibly because Saddam posed a threat to the United States. So far it would appear that this was a lie. That doesn't bother you? Aaah. Most voters probably feel the same as you anyway, so what's the point.

[Matt]

Matt, you've missed the point. The war was fought ostensibly because Saddam posed a threat to the United States. So far it would appear that this was a lie. That doesn't bother you? Aaah. Most voters probably feel the same as you anyway, so what's the point.

All presidents lie, hey even Clinton did a few times Ron. I think the Iraqi people are much better of than they were before the war. If it was a lie then, that does bother you? Most Democrats feel the same as you anyway, so what's the point? Partisan politics?

[Rspaight]

Maybe the weapons are hidden under these:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... May13.html

Wow, there really was no reason for a war. Not even a moral obligation. What a nice guy Saddam was! Gosh we were so mislead.

Leaving aside the issue of whether the US is obligated to invade countries due to the moral inadequacies of their leadership (which in this instance we helped to power in the first place), there's this (from the linked article):

The BBC said it did not know how or when the victims in the Hilla graves were killed, but said they could have been Shiite Muslims massacred by Iraqi forces after a Shiite uprising against Hussein after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

If that's the case, that blood is partially on our hands. Bush I encouraged the Shiites to revolt, then (via Schwarzkopf) gave Saddam permission to use armed helicopter gunships against them and didn't lift a finger to assist the rebels. We sold them out, and they got slaughtered. That's why they sat out this war -- they didn't trust us.

Of course, the other likely possibility is that the mass graves date from the Iran-Iraq war, in which we backed Saddam even after he used WMDs against the Iranians and his own people (during which time, of course, Rummy was Reagan's special envoy to Iraq).

All presidents lie, hey even Clinton did a few times Ron. I think the Iraqi people are much better of than they were before the war. If it was a lie then, that does bother you? Most Democrats feel the same as you anyway, so what's the point? Partisan politics?

I think there's a difference between lying about a blowjob and *fabricating* evidence that sends 100 Americans to their deaths, and kills who knows how many Iraqis. But that's just me.

Ryan

[lukpac]

Maybe the weapons are hidden under these:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... May13.html

Wow, there really was no reason for a war. Not even a moral obligation. What a nice guy Saddam was! Gosh we were so mislead.

"Liberating" Iraq (it remains to be seen what that means, exactly) was a convenient side effect of the war. It wasn't, however, the reason we were given for starting the war. We were told Saddam was a threat to the American way of life, that he had WMD, and that he wouldn't be afraid to use them and/or sell them to others. Well, he didn't use any when we attacked him directly (with plenty of time to prepare, mind you), nor have any been found.

Our main purpose was clearly never to "liberate" Iraq, otherwise we'd be preparing to fight wars all over the globe in the name of "freedom". I mean, why not bomb North Korea? Or Cuba? Or China? Why is the freedom of the Iraqi people more important than the freedom of the people of those countries?

[balthazar]

Our main purpose was clearly never to "liberate" Iraq, otherwise we'd be preparing to fight wars all over the globe in the name of "freedom". I mean, why not bomb North Korea? Or Cuba? Or China? Why is the freedom of the Iraqi people more important than the freedom of the people of those countries?

The Iraqi people have oil. North Korea doesn't seem to have anything we can't get somewhere else. China's got cheap plastic toys. Cuba's got old cars and cigars.

I agree that the jury's still out on the WMD. I'm sincerely hoping that some evidence is found that Saddam was at least developing them.

[Ron]

If it was a lie then, that does bother you? Most Democrats feel the same as you anyway, so what's the point? Partisan politics?

It's got nothing to do with partisan politics, Matt. It has everything to do with lies and the future security of the United States.

We were told the war was necessary so as to make America safer. But as the war had absolutely nothing to do with Al Qaeda--the real threat to American's safety--then I'd have to conclude that America is no safer today than it was six months ago. In fact, as resources [and attention] have been diverted elsewhere, I'd say the U.S. is even *less* secure than it was before the war. Factor in pissing off untold millions, many of whom will support Al Qaeda in one way or another, and I'd say *much* less secure.

The war was a diversion--a "feel good" bit of American ass kicking. "Liberating Iraq"? You can't possibly think that Bush & Crew give a rat's ass about the Iraqi people, can you? Hell, I'm not so sure they give a rat's ass about the American people.