Tricking the Troops: The Moral Consequences of the Administration's Saddam-9/11 Lies
According to a blurb in a hardcopy of Newsweek (can't find it online, though), EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT (85%!!!!!) of American military personell in Iraq say they are there in order to defend America in response to the 9/11 attacks.
We usually think that the administration is morally bankrupt because it lied to us about the Saddam-9/11 link...but we should remember that they've also done something far, far worse: they tricked us into sending people to Iraq, but they also tricked people into going to Iraq.
There are people--many of them kids, many of them very idealistic, many of them intent on doing what's right--who are over there fighting and dying for a lie. We can talk all day about whether there might be good consequences (e.g. the promotion of democracy) unrelated to our real reasons for being there, but the hard fact of the matter is that the people doing the killing and the dying for us are there because they were lied to--and, perhaps, because we didn't put our collective foot down about it.
Every now and then I feel like I have what you might call an out-of-party experience, in which my partisan commitments and suchlike seem to fall away, and I feel like I'm able to think about what's going on with great clarity. You might think that I'd find myself looking at things from an even more centrist position, a position from which things seem less clear, and from which this administration seems less terrible. But it isn't so. At these times it seems that the real awfulness of this administration comes into even clearer focus. Away from all the hype and rhetoric and gotcha politics, these guys seem even more despicable than most of us seem to realize. A group of crooks and liars and idiots and idealogues that could not deserve the American presidency less.
If that 85% figure doesn't make you want to scream and break things and weep, then we probably have very different ideas about what the great American experiment is intended to accomplish.
According to a blurb in a hardcopy of Newsweek (can't find it online, though), EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT (85%!!!!!) of American military personell in Iraq say they are there in order to defend America in response to the 9/11 attacks.
We usually think that the administration is morally bankrupt because it lied to us about the Saddam-9/11 link...but we should remember that they've also done something far, far worse: they tricked us into sending people to Iraq, but they also tricked people into going to Iraq.
There are people--many of them kids, many of them very idealistic, many of them intent on doing what's right--who are over there fighting and dying for a lie. We can talk all day about whether there might be good consequences (e.g. the promotion of democracy) unrelated to our real reasons for being there, but the hard fact of the matter is that the people doing the killing and the dying for us are there because they were lied to--and, perhaps, because we didn't put our collective foot down about it.
Every now and then I feel like I have what you might call an out-of-party experience, in which my partisan commitments and suchlike seem to fall away, and I feel like I'm able to think about what's going on with great clarity. You might think that I'd find myself looking at things from an even more centrist position, a position from which things seem less clear, and from which this administration seems less terrible. But it isn't so. At these times it seems that the real awfulness of this administration comes into even clearer focus. Away from all the hype and rhetoric and gotcha politics, these guys seem even more despicable than most of us seem to realize. A group of crooks and liars and idiots and idealogues that could not deserve the American presidency less.
If that 85% figure doesn't make you want to scream and break things and weep, then we probably have very different ideas about what the great American experiment is intended to accomplish.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:21 AM
2 Comments:
Ran out of voice to scream years ago - don't have any more toes to stub from kicking the walls - can't drink booze any more I'm so dehydrated from weeping.
I hear ya, brother.
Hell is the absence of reason.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home