One by one, things fall away.
Remember September 11? Read these, the words of your own president:
"No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," the president said yesterday after a meeting at the White House with lawmakers.
OK, got that? No link to Sept. 11. Right, got it? You understand?
And while the government claims that there were links to Osama, those links were pretty much limited to a couple of Iraqi government officials meeting with him and concluding he was a nutcase and both parties mutually realizing they had no common ground from which to work.
A threat to his neighbors? To the United States? Between Operation Desert Fox, trade embargoes and the no-fly zones he wasn't even a threat to the Kurds in the north of his own country.
OK, then there's the whole thing about liberating the Iraqi people from the grip of a brutal dictator. What made him a brutal dictator? Let's see. Death squads? Torture and rape? Arrest without charge? Restriction of civil liberties? Mass murder?
Here's some simple math: Who has killed more innocent Iraqi citizens? Saddam? Or US?
Who?
And how much death of what kind of people is too much? And how many innocent deaths should the Iraqis be able to absorb and still think it's for their own good, and not get resentful? You can proclaim and declare and opine till you're blue in the face, but if you talk about violent death like it's just an inevitable cost of war, and that it's justified, think but this:
Dead is dead. Killing an innocent person is wrong. Killing is killing. Attention moral-high-grounders, Christian conservatives:
Now someone approached him and said, "Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?" He answered him, "Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good. 13 If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments." He asked him, "Which ones?" And Jesus replied, " 'You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother'; and 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" The young man said to him, "All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?" Jesus said to him, "If you wish to be perfect, 16 go, sell what you have and give to (the) poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (RSV, Matthew 19:16-21)
Right, got that, too? Killing. Is. Wrong.
OK, WMDs them. Remember how top administration official after top administration official told us they had iron-clad, absolute proof that Saddam had reconstituted his weapons programs? Remember, "We can't wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud?" Let's revisit that Bible verse above. You know, the bit about not bearing false witness?
No WMDs. None. Haven't been for a long time. No evidence of recent weapons programs. Their intelligence? Their absolute proof? It simply didn't exist. It wasn't there. It wasn't that they were misled by their intelligence people. Their intelligence people told them from the start what the truth was.
Let's review, shall we?
- No connection to 9/11
- Functionally no connection to Osama bin Laden
- Greater brutality now than ever before under Saddam Hussein. A populace that generally, now, hates US as much as they ever hated him and simply want to get back to their lives.
- No WMDs
OK, so what rationalizations do you have left? From where I sit, all you can cling to is your blind faith that your president is a good man. But a man who, either through direct action or complicity, lies and kills and offers the economic benefits of the carnage and destruction to his friends and associates rather than to the victims of Saddam and of our occupation is not a good man.
Smart or stupid, it doesn't matter, and regardless of any other issues, he has broken faith with the American and Iraqi people, he has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, not to mention his betrayal of the men and women in our military who have died because of his actions and his lies and the ones who lie in hospitals or at home broken and forgotten by the nation that put them there.
And he violates, daily, without repentance, the tenets of the religious faith to which he lays claim.
Go ahead, guys, prove to me he's a good man. Can you offer me anything other than personal opinion? I want facts, links, chapter and verse. Otherwise, give him up, abandon him to the whirwind he's reaped, and work with right-minded people across the board, across the political spectrum, who are trying to redeem the promise of our country and put us on the path of integrity and prosperity.
And with that last gasp, I'm done with Iraq in these pages, assuming by step-brother comes back whole and alive this summer.
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