DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
The war in Iraq has gone so wrong that patriotic generals and intelligence officials are leaking ugly facts about it faster than the Administration can lie about them. A high-level intelligence report sent to the White House in April flatly declared that the war damaged the U.S. and simultaneously knocked our campaign against Al Qaeda off the rails. Generals complain they're being asked to send underequipped, undertrained combat brigades off to the slaughterhouse and to strip the last few working gears off the Natonal Guard and Reserves.
But only last week Cheney said he and his mystic pals did the right thing invading Iraq and if he had to do it all over again, he’d do it all the same way. The new, just-composed official White House response to the leaked intelligence report is that the White House knows better than the intelligence agencies. That’s a repeat of the same failed pathology that got us into Iraq in the first place. Give them a few more days and they'll fish another Curveball or Chalabi out of the sludge to tell it their way.
There’s nothing to argue about any more. The war has killed more than 2,600 Americans in uniform plus hundreds of American mercenaries fulfilling military functions. Dead Iraqis now number, according to best estimates, 135,000. (Best statistics on this, by the way, come from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher’s comic writers). This same ratio applied to the U.S., would give us 1.7 million dead Americans. Kind of makes it tough to win Iraq hearts and minds, particularly since surviving family members tend to be jobless and hungry, without medication, electricity, clean water, sewer lines or relief from mega-miserey. Not to mention they might be picked up at any moment by death squads. For Cheney to say that everything he did was correct is a deeply psychopathic statement. It’s not just devoid of human feelings. It’s Satanic.
If Cheney and all the people who work for him – Bush, Rummy, etc., really believe what they are saying, they’re raving lunatics. If they don’t believe what they’re saying, they’re raving lunatics. But don't expect their followers to be affected by the new revelations. They'll sing their marching songs down to the last corpse -- as long as it's somebody else's corpse.
And what are we to think of those pro-war Democrats like Hillary Clinton who say we can’t afford to quit Iraq, so we have to keep stuffing all these lives plus $6 billion a month in borrowed money into the wood chipper? Where have you gone Gene McCarthy? The nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
