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TORTURED LOGIC
09/26/2007
The Republicans continue to torment us with their tortured logic concerning Iraq.
A few examples:
"We have to keep fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here. If we leave Iraq, they will follow us home."
"We attacked Iraq because we thought they had weapons of mass destruction. Every intelligence agency claimed that."
"Saddam had thrown out the weapons inspectors so we had no way of knowing Iraq didn't have WMD."
"Iraq is the central front in the 'war on terror'."
"We had to go to Iraq because of 9/11. We couldn't take the chance that Saddam would hit us with a nuclear or chemical 9/11."
"If you don't support the war, you don't support the troops. If you don't support the war, you want America to lose and the terrorists to win."
These talking points go on and on, regardless of evidence to the contrary. They are the mantras of a party whose members (all except Bush, Cheney, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and a few others who appear to be true believers in the insanity) know better, but having drunk the Kool-Aid, are incapable of saying "I'm sorry" or "we were wrong." Instead, they simply carry on with the deceptions and lies because they think it will help them stay in power.
This morning on C-Span, for example, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tx) was challenged by a caller on some of this tortured logic. The caller pointed out that Republicans continually say two things: if we leave Iraq there will be turmoil there as al Qaeda attempts to take over, and that al Qaeda will follow us back to the United States. "Which is it," he asked, "will they cause problems there or will they follow us home?" The caller made an interesting point, and Ms. Hutchison gave an incoherent answer. She rambled on in Republican tortured logic, and at one point even said that in the run-up to the Iraq War there was good intelligence that Saddam was planning a chemical attack on the United States. WHAT?! Now they're not just claiming Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, they're actually inventing a threatened attack. Good Grief!
I doubt if the Republicans, even the ones who have turned against the war (not because it was wrong to begin with, but because Bush and his generals have made a mess of it), will ever stop this tortured logic. So, just for fun, let's take each of the above statements and question their validity. And let's not use any insider information (I have never been to Iraq, been privy to classified intelligence reports, or had a briefing with a politician) but simply rely on what has been reported publicly and what makes sense if we simply apply a little skepticism and critical thinking to what we have learned.
"We have to keep fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here…"
First of all, could we please identify "them?" We seem to be fighting many enemies over there, all of our own making, including Sunnis, Shiites, and the mysterious "al Qaeda in Iraq" (the military calls this group "AQI") which we know very little about. Surely, the Sunnis and Shiites are not coming over here as they are fighting only for control of their country. They have no beef with us and our "homeland." They are pissed at our military and our civilian government that has destroyed their country. So "them" must be "al Qaeda in Iraq." Once we leave Iraq, the thinking is, they will set up a safe haven, perhaps take over a section of Iraq, and begin planning attacks against America.
Oh, please! Even the military says AQI is a small group. So how are they supposed to take over an entire province in Iraq? Once we leave, neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites will allow them to wreak havoc in the country indefinitely. Iraqi Sunnis are already turning against them, and if they don't finish the job, the Shiites will. Since al Qaeda is a Sunni organization, and the Shiites are the dominant group in Iraq, it's likely the powerful Shiite cleric, Moqtada al Sadr, will send his Mahdi army against them.
Iraq won't be anything like Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviet Union. Afghanistan has long been a primitive, backwater country, its population impoverished, unlike Iraq which, long before the invasion, had a sophisticated, educated, middle class population. Al Qaeda will not be given a safe haven in Iraq like it was in Afghanistan. And if it tries, there's always Shiite Iran, which would never allow it to gain power. (Of course, if we destroy Iran's military capability by going to war against them, things might unfold differently.)
As for "them" following us over here, al Qaeda (though not al Qaeda in Iraq) may already be here. Al Qaeda based in Afghanistan already attacked us once and we were not at war against them. Al Qaeda and related terrorist groups also exist in dozens of countries, and if they have the capability, they can attack us from any of those countries now. If they don't have the capability, being in Iraq won't give it to them. That argument about following us home simply doesn't hold up. And by the way, where on earth is Osama bin Laden, the leader who has already hurt us and can hurt us again? I don't think he's in Iraq.
"We attacked Iraq because we thought they had weapons of mass destruction. Every intelligence estimate claimed that."
We know very little of the details of all the intelligence estimates because of the enormous secrecy of the Bush administration. It appears the intelligence agencies thought Saddam could be reconstructing some of his weapons programs, but we didn't have good intelligence on the ground so how could we know for sure? We couldn't. And retired intelligence officers have said that the intelligence reports included dissenting opinions on Saddam's possession of WMD, which the president chose to ignore. Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector, knew Iraq had no weapons, and in fact traveled to Baghdad and told the Iraqis to let the inspectors back in to prove it to the Bush administration. They agreed and the inspectors came back in, finding no weapons. However, Bush did not wait for a final report as he didn't want the American people to know the truth and stop him from being a "war president." The possibility that Saddam might have nukes was the perfect excuse for war, so he told the U.N. inspectors to leave so he could start bombing. Which leads to the next tortured bit of logic, one repeated by both the president and other apologists for the war:
"Saddam had thrown out the weapons inspectors so we had no way of knowing Iraq didn't have WMD."
This statement, repeated by Kay Bailey Hutchison this morning on C-Span, is incredibly misleading. Yes, Saddam kicked the inspectors out - in 1998, but he let them back in in 2003, at the urging of former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, to prove he had no weapons. When Bush and his cronies use this phrase about throwing out the inspectors they are leading people to believe that Saddam never allowed the inspectors back in, but that is simply false. He did let them in, and then it was Bush himself who ordered the inspectors out in 2003, because he wanted to start his war. Ultimately, Bush's own inspectors found no weapons. But Bush and company leave the statement vague deliberately, to give easily duped citizens the impression that there was no way to know Saddam had disarmed. The reality is there most definitely was a way to know, a way that might have prevented this war, and the nearly 4000 American deaths, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and tens of thousands of injuries to Americans, and that way was already in progress when Bush himself put an end to it. This is why, in his State of the Union Speech in 2004, Bush had to justify his war by claiminmg that the inspectors had found "weapons of mass destruction related activity programs," which could mean just about anything.
"Iraq is the central front in the 'war on terror.' "
First of all, there is no actual war on terror, because terror is not a country and you cannot make war against it. Like the "war on drugs," it is a metaphor. You can try to stop terrorism, thwart it, limit its damage, understand the root causes so you can work to neutralize it, but you can't go to war against it. So, since we are not engaged in a real war, there is no "central front." If the Bush administration was really trying to end terrorism, they wouldn't have started an illegal war that angered a certain segment of the Muslim population and increased the number of terrorists. Terrorism is a tactic used by people who have a cause and sometimes by people who have no good cause, but nonetheless, it is a tactic to instill fear. People who commit acts of terror come in all shapes, sizes and nationalities, are not all Muslim, and are not only in Iraq. There are probably more potential terrorists in Europe than in Iraq, as we have seen with the recent foiled plots and arrests in Britain, Germany and Denmark. Yet we are not making war against Europe.
"We had to go to Iraq because of 9/11. We couldn't take the chance that Saddam would hit us with a nuclear or chemical 9/11."
Everything supposedly changed after 9/11, so I guess that means we're allowed to let fear control us and influence us to overreact, which is exactly what some people in government did. But we didn't go to war with Iraq because of 9/11, no matter how many times Bush refers to that terrible day, we didn't go to war because of weapons of mass destruction, and we didn't go to war to create a democracy.
Recently, in promoting his new book, Alan Greenspan, the great enabler of the regressive Bush tax cuts, said he regrets that people won't just admit that the Iraq War was largely about oil. To any sentient American, that statement has some truth to it, although it isn't the whole story. What is also true is that the war is not about democracy. All we need to know to assert both of those things is to observe that we do not depose dictators in dangerous countries that do not have oil, like North Korea, we do not press for democracies in friendly oil-rich monarchies, like Saudi Arabia, and we condemn democratic elections when we don't like the outcomes, like in Palestine.
The truth is, we citizens don't really know the whole story about why we went to war. What we do know is that certain groups of people stood to benefit from a war in Iraq, besides Iran and al Qaeda, who have obviously benefited. Among others who benefited are: George W. Bush, who got to be a "war president," which he thinks helps his legacy; Dick Cheney, who used both 9/11 and the Iraq War to enhance the powers of the executive that he felt were stolen by Congress after Nixon; a group of insane "neoconservatives" who wanted to usher in "the New American Century" and remake the Middle East as a satellite of the lone superpower, and of course, a number of large and powerful corporations including Halliburton, Bechtel, oil and defense companies, and others. Oh, and let us not forget Israel, which at first thought it would benefit from the elimination of Saddam Hussein, but which may now be having second thoughts and is now pressing for war with Iran.
As to preventing Saddam Hussein from hitting us with a chemical or nuclear weapon, how was he supposed to do that? Even intelligence experts who thought he might have some of those "weapons of mass destruction related activity programs" knew he didn't have long range missiles. Without those, how was he supposed to get a nuclear or chemical weapon to wreak destruction on our soil? Was an Iraqi "Mohammad Atta" going to smuggle a nuke onto a plane and detonate it over Los Angeles? Come on, people, read up on nuclear weapons and you will see that it is nearly impossible to deliver a nuclear weapon without a missile on which to put it.
As for chemical weapons, I suppose one or several terrorists could bring one to a city and unleash it, but it wouldn't do nearly the damage terrorists want to see. Only people in close proximity would be affected and it would soon dissipate in the air, making it relatively harmless in short order. Chemical weapons are mostly used on a battlefield, or dropped from planes, as Saddam did against the Kurds in 1988, when the U.S. did nothing to stop him or condemn him. But I cannot fathom how Saddam could have gotten his hands on enough planes in the U.S. to do the damage he did to the Kurds. He certainly couldn't have flown his own planes from Iraq to the United States and there are very few scenarios, especially after 9/11, in which he could have gotten his hands on any U.S. planes.
It's time everyone finally admitted the truth. 9/11 wasn't the reason Bush went to war against Iraq. It's the excuse, but not the reason.
"If you don't support the war, you don't support the troops. If you don't support the war, you want America to lose."
These are the most un-American statements I can think of, and they are used continually by Republican legislators and pundits. The latest dust-up over the Move-On ad criticizing General Petraeus was just the latest variant. Now that junior is waging war everyone is supposed to show their patriotism by shutting up. Dissent is not allowed. Criticizing the war, its beginnings or its ongoing execution, or even one of its generals, is simply treasonous. Any criticism of the war puts the troops in jeopardy, just how I'm not sure, but that is the assertion.
For the ten millionth, and hopefully the last time, here is the reality:
Those who oppose this war know the difference between the individual soldiers and Marines, and the policies of the President of the United States, who is their civilian commander. They know the difference between the sacrifices these men and women – and their families - are making, which are monumental, and the sacrifices made by the policymakers, which are none. They know the war is more a political and ideological decision than a national security one, and they know that the troops, who have taken an oath to defend the country and are bound to obey the commands of their superiors, do not have the time or resources to understand all that has gone into the decision to send them into harm's way.
When a company fails, it is not the workers who cause the failure, but the decision makers at the top. Likewise, when a president wrongly takes the country to war, and fails miserably in its execution, it is not the soldiers who are responsible for the failure. So we who oppose the war oppose the president and his decision. We do not oppose those who are duty bound to carry out his decision. We also deeply resent the president sending into war unnecessarily our sons, daughters, husbands, wives and neighbors, who have so bravely agreed to fight on our behalf. We see a huge difference between supporting the war and supporting the troops and believe the best way to support the troops is not to misuse them, and to oppose any war in which they are fighting for a cause that is not supported by the American people.
As for war dissenters wanting America to lose, poppycock! Those who oppose this war do not oppose America. It is because we love America, and her founding principles, and the greatness of her people, and the example she can show to the world, that we oppose this illegal, immoral, unjust war, undertaken for mysterious reasons, and justified with lies. America is better than that. America's military does not deserve to be used up in order to secure oil, or depose a dictator, or avenge a father, or fulfill some ideological dream of empire, or enhance the powers of the American president, or secure his legacy, or enrich corporations. America's military is the greatest in the world, and should be treated with the respect it deserves. Not arming it adequately, or protecting its members with body armor and armored vehicles, or giving them adequate rest between deployments, or adequately caring for the injured, or appropriately honoring the fallen, does not constitute respect. It is not the war protestors who do not support the troops. It is George W. Bush.
The Republicans have long been good with words, always associating Republicans and war supporters with positive words like "victory" and "support" and "protect" and "patriot" and associating Democrats and those opposed to this war with negative words like "defeat" and "surrender" and "traitor." But no matter how many times one repeats pretty or ugly words, it doesn't make any of them true.
The Republicans have gotten away with twisted logic and Orwellian talking points for far too long. The country is tired of it and wants a change, yet the Republicans cling to their tired and worn out phrases and, like a dog with a bone, won't let go.
It's time for Democrats to call the game, to expose the rhetoric for what it is, the faulty logic and hollow words of an administration that has failed and a party that is not only bankrupt but cowardly. Most Republicans know the game is over, but only a handful, like Chuck Hegel, will acknowledge the truth. The rest, like John McCain, Duncan Hunter, Newt Gingrich and Joe Lieberman, are reduced to harping about an ad by Move-On, or a speech given at Columbia University by the Iranian president, or to proposing an amendment which would give the President the authority to compound the mistake he made four years ago and attack Iran. They throw out straw men to hide the fact that they can no longer defend the policies of this administration, and engage in hypocrisy of the first order when they support vicious attacks against war heroes and condemn those who question the veracity of their own pet general.
I've heard stars burn brightest before they go out. I think the increasing loudness and shrillness of the Republican Party means it is heading for irrelevancy, not just because of the war, but because of the increasingly frightening economic picture in this country, which it is largely responsible for. We don't need a party that sends men and women to their deaths for no good reason, does its best to destroy the middle class, enriches a handful of corporations while small businesses can no longer compete, allows a great city to die, ignores climate change, tries to insert religion into government, eliminates civil liberties in violation of the letter and the spirit of the Bill of Rights, and contrary to the intention of the Founders and the Constitution, creates an executive branch that wields near dictatorial power.
We don't need a political party that cares more about establishing a permanent hold on power than it does about the well being and the will of the people of this great nation. Maybe a few sensible people can save the GOP, reform it and make it grand once again, but I'm not holding my breath, and if it indeed burns out, let me be the first to say "Good Riddance."
-Ellen Terich
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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