Oh. Really?
So as you may have heard, BushCo™ has given up on its search for WMDs. From the BBC:
But I always sorta assumed that despite all this, something or other would eventually turn up. Even if it was just a batch of now decayed and now largely harmlessly inert blistering agents tucked away in a bunker somewhere.
Go fig. So what, did Hussein and his fellow thugs really dump every bit?
Interesting.
I'm not actually sure how I feel about this. It's annoyingly too late for the US citizenry to toss the lying shits in the administration out on their asses the way they deserve--and really, it seems to me if they were going to do so, they should have even on the information they had as of the election. This is just, it seems to me, a bookend. In the encyclopaedias, it will be written: no, they never found anything.
But do let us sum up now what it means. For the benefit of those encyclopaedias.
A 'pretext' is a well-known phenomenon in foreign policy. It's as obvious as John Ashcroft's utter lack of taste in music and statuary that's all the WMD thing ever was, in terms of foreign relations.
In domestic US terms, it was a 'big lie', used as a propaganda device--as a bludgeon to silence criticism, as a lingering threat to frighten the US citizenry into getting into line. Or have we forgotten a certain group of slimy gits' rhetoric about bioagents and chemical weapons released into US cities?
Now you can go on until we're all sick of hearing it about whether or not the current debacle in Iraq will ever come to any good whatsoever (though I think, probably, not, Hussein's being busted notwithstanding, since I strongly doubt whoever eventually takes control at the end of this long and bloody road will be vastly better, and the toll of deaths and destruction from the invasion itself and the costly fallout throughout the Arab world and beyond also need to be brought into the equation). And the dead and dying in Iraq do deserve their due. They're one of the results of this lie.
But for some reason the thing I keep coming back to, at the end of the day, is still that domestic element: the Bush administration's vicious, nasty, shameless manipulation of their own people.
Fact is, they've scared the hell outta folks with that bullshit. A people already frightened enough, after the atrocities the real terrorists perpetrated on September 11, were systematically manipulated by a criminally irresponsible administration doing its damndest to keep that terror alive. The goal: encourage the nastiest, most xenophobic, most paranoid elements among them. Fan the flames of fear. Play them for chumps, and who cares if the social milieu that emerges is a paranoid, psychotic mess, and a misery to live in.
All to get a coupla ugly, lying shits re-elected.
My congratulations to them, I suppose. It seems to have worked very nicely.
1 Actually, now that I think about it, we could reasonably have concluded as much some time earlier than that--as plenty of folk had noted much earlier the various claims surrounding yellow cake, aluminum tubes et al stunk to high heaven (note added after original posting).
Intelligence officials have confirmed the US has stopped searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
They say the chief US investigator, Charles Duelfer, is not planning to return to the country.
Mr Duelfer reported last year that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons at the time of the US-led invasion nearly two years ago.
The existence of WMD had been the stated reason in Washington and London for going to war with Iraq
-- from US gives up search for Iraq WMD on BBC News
Now I gotta admit, I'm still finding this all a bit surprising. Yes, it's now a well-established fact that the Bush administration's only real talent is for lying their collective fat asses off and, after a fashion, getting away with it. So yes, the mere fact that their claims about knowing WMDs were present long ago proved to be just another pack of big fat howlers (yes, I'd say we knew they were lying when, within a few weeks of entering the capital, they still had no material to show1) was nothing to write home about (and sure, it's something to write some war crimes tribunal or other about, but that's probably another matter).But I always sorta assumed that despite all this, something or other would eventually turn up. Even if it was just a batch of now decayed and now largely harmlessly inert blistering agents tucked away in a bunker somewhere.
Go fig. So what, did Hussein and his fellow thugs really dump every bit?
Interesting.
I'm not actually sure how I feel about this. It's annoyingly too late for the US citizenry to toss the lying shits in the administration out on their asses the way they deserve--and really, it seems to me if they were going to do so, they should have even on the information they had as of the election. This is just, it seems to me, a bookend. In the encyclopaedias, it will be written: no, they never found anything.
But do let us sum up now what it means. For the benefit of those encyclopaedias.
A 'pretext' is a well-known phenomenon in foreign policy. It's as obvious as John Ashcroft's utter lack of taste in music and statuary that's all the WMD thing ever was, in terms of foreign relations.
In domestic US terms, it was a 'big lie', used as a propaganda device--as a bludgeon to silence criticism, as a lingering threat to frighten the US citizenry into getting into line. Or have we forgotten a certain group of slimy gits' rhetoric about bioagents and chemical weapons released into US cities?
Now you can go on until we're all sick of hearing it about whether or not the current debacle in Iraq will ever come to any good whatsoever (though I think, probably, not, Hussein's being busted notwithstanding, since I strongly doubt whoever eventually takes control at the end of this long and bloody road will be vastly better, and the toll of deaths and destruction from the invasion itself and the costly fallout throughout the Arab world and beyond also need to be brought into the equation). And the dead and dying in Iraq do deserve their due. They're one of the results of this lie.
But for some reason the thing I keep coming back to, at the end of the day, is still that domestic element: the Bush administration's vicious, nasty, shameless manipulation of their own people.
Fact is, they've scared the hell outta folks with that bullshit. A people already frightened enough, after the atrocities the real terrorists perpetrated on September 11, were systematically manipulated by a criminally irresponsible administration doing its damndest to keep that terror alive. The goal: encourage the nastiest, most xenophobic, most paranoid elements among them. Fan the flames of fear. Play them for chumps, and who cares if the social milieu that emerges is a paranoid, psychotic mess, and a misery to live in.
All to get a coupla ugly, lying shits re-elected.
My congratulations to them, I suppose. It seems to have worked very nicely.
1 Actually, now that I think about it, we could reasonably have concluded as much some time earlier than that--as plenty of folk had noted much earlier the various claims surrounding yellow cake, aluminum tubes et al stunk to high heaven (note added after original posting).
posted by AJM at 1:42 p.m. (Permanent Link)
