Five Years Ago, And A Year From Now

by Steve Soto

This blog, five years ago today noted that Bush certified to Congress he was attacking Iraq because Saddam wouldn't comply with UN resolutions by disarming; and that he was also attacking Iraq because of Saddam's support for and ties to Al Qaeda.

We have known for years, and had it recently confirmed by the Pentagon in a report it wishes to bury, that Saddam didn't have a role in 9/11 or in assisting those that carried it out. We also know that this information was available to the administration from its own intelligence community before March 19, 2003. But this is irrelevant, because the decision to invade Iraq was made long before March 2003 and even long before the Bush White House pushed Congress into a use of force authorization vote in late 2002 just before the midterm elections.

Now five years, 4,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and at least a trillion dollars of American taxpayer monies later, we find ourselves faced with another GOP presidential campaign that wants to highlight this war as a righteous cause requiring more patience and American sacrifice, based on an appeal to ignore the first four years of this war and give a blank check to the next four years.

And John McCain could very well get away with it. He and the GOP plan to scare independent voters, Reagan Democrats, and the GOP sheeple one more time with fears of Al Qaeda streaming from Iraq to Kansas if we leave. They plan to divert these voters from asking tough questions of their GOP nominee on the real cost to this country from his Iraq policy; to divert them from questioning his lack of vision or commitment to deal with health care and the economy. Instead, they plan to run this campaign on race masked as an argument about integrity and experience; on fear masked as an argument about steadiness and readiness; and on another Bush term of negligence masked as an argument about Democratic appeasement and intrusion into the lives of everyday Americans.

And it could very well work once again, to the degree that we'll wake up one day a year from now with little changed in Iraq except the body count and the costs; with an economy relying upon the free markets to take care of the privileged once again while leaving more and more people behind; and a health care system still being ignored while we pump trillions into the GOP's disaster capitalist economy.

Yet the media will fawn, and tell us that McCain is more seasoned, accessible, and more capable than Bush, making him a much better salesman for the same illegalities and negligence that got us here after over seven years of this administration of lost opportunities.

But all that matters to the sheeple is that Straight Talk saved them from that black man or that nasty Clinton woman on the teevee.