The argument outran the facts. I had a big long post here about how angry I am about this whole thing. I couldn’t bring myself to post it. You know, I have a couple of subtle but important distinctions in my head. One is the separation of our Government with the current Administration. The Government is all those folks in all the government’s many agencies who’ve made a career out of it. The Government handles the day to day stuff and actually changes very little over the course of any four year administration. The Administration is the group of people who are politically appointed during a President’s term.
It’s pretty clear that the Administration ignored our Government in the build-up to the war. They cherry-picked evidence and used debunked, suspect and out of date information in making their case to the American people for the need to go to war with Iraq. I’m not sure how to react to all this other than anger. We were intentionally misled. The Administration knew their goal and knew they didn’t have the case to back it up. They massaged, manufactured and created out of thin air, evidence used to convince Congress and the American people that we needed to spend billions of dollars, sacrifice American troops, remove thousands of Iraqis from the face of the Earth and spend untold amounts of money and time rebuilding Iraq. That’s unforgivable to me. They played on our fears and anger about September 11th and sold us a lie. They said Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11th when the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq has been thoroughly debunked. They said that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon “in the very near future” when it’s been shown that there was no formal nuclear program in Iraq. They said that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack in forty-five minutes when we still haven’t found any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. They told us they knew where the weapons are, and again, none have been found. They lied to us.
This is now longer than the “angry post” I deleted. You know, I am angry. But, I’m also resigned to the fact that not enough people in this country care that they were lied to, or think they weren’t. I know that no one in the Bush Administration will ever be held responsible for lying to the American people, and for lying to Congress. I know that the only way I can do anything is to do my best to make sure that George W. Bush doesn’t with the election next year. It doesn’t feel like that’s enough, but it’ll have to do.