Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Woody's Revenge

Woodrow Wilson was tormented by Republican isolationists. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. of Massachusetts was a particular thorn in his side and is credited with successfully leading the charge against the U.S. joining the League of Nations that Wilson championed so valiantly. There are cynics who believe that Lodge and his cohort whipped poor Woody into the stroke that killed him. And, ultimately, that failure led to the calamity that was World War II.

Woody and Franklin Roosevelt were my childhood heroes. I must admit, however, that it wasn’t until I was much older that I came to know they didn’t really like each other. The civics teachers of my youth – you don’t know what civics is or was? – too bad! – placed Wilson on such a high pedestal that I thought he had been canonized. His fourteen points – it was fourteen wasn’t it? – were gospel for these molders of youthful minds in the nineteen forties. That every Balkan family could be its own nation if it wanted to be made sense to young idealists, and there was no other approach to American foreign policy that should be entertained, according to junior high school teachers of the day.

It was Wilsonian doctrine that shaped my views toward the United Nations in the years following W.W. II and, especially, when the North Koreans attacked their countrymen. Only as I aged and came to live through other eras did I begin to challenge the notions drilled into me during the most malleable years of my life.

I came to see the UN as a useful but flawed – even corrupt – institution but an absolutely necessary vehicle for airing world grievances and for developing coalitions for putting down actions by states acting outside international norms. Thus Korea, the Balkans, the invasion of Kuwait, and many other similar ventures could be argued – sometimes successfully – before major international unions like the UN and NATO.

However flawed the UN or other international alliances, they gave cover to the U.S. in foreign affairs - until the debacle that is Iraq today. We stepped out from behind the curtain and acted on our own – with a phony coalition designed to hide that fact. When the mission began to flounder, we had to cover our tracks. We needed a philosophical underpinning for our folly, and the neocons were at the ready with Woody’s idealism and his fourteen – it was fourteen, right? – points and democracy for everybody with the U.S. for delivering it.

Only now the real Republicans, moderates, independents, and everyone else, including me, who’d weaned themselves from Woody years ago and who’d moved on to the realpolitik of Tricky Dick, Dr. Strangelove, and Bret Scowcroft had bought into what old Lodge had tried to tell us.

It took a good while, but Woody sure is taking his revenge on the Republicans. Sadly, we’re all in the boat with them.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Sunday, November 27, 2005

It Might As Well Be Spring

It’s almost spring! I’m not really a scold by nature; I’d rather be gardening or drinking Bud and watching the Red Sox than chastising neocons. Yesterday’s fulmination against the president has again sated the beast of my syndrome, Blogus Bovinus Wastus, so I’m going to take another short sabbatical from raising your collective blood pressure.

Truly, I’m a very positive person and could pass for a Transcendentalist from Concord. Years ago, on one of my many visits to Ohio, I heard the lame joke that there were only two seasons in that wonderful state: winter and road repair. Sadly, I’ve heard that old wag’s tale repeated about many other locales and many times since.

But there really are only two seasons for optimists. The myth of a four season climate in many parts of the United States is simply hollow for those of us raised on Walden Pond. After pondering the problem for many years, I realized that everyone is out of step but me. There are only two seasons, spring and fall. The solstices are real but the equinoxes are but fiction.

But the solstices are mislabeled. There is no winter or summer for true optimists – other than those who label themselves farmers. Winter is cold and summer is hot, too hot and too cold. If we begin with the premise that the winter solstice is a new beginning – as almost all of our ancestors did all the way back to the times that they didn’t write this wastus down – we can eliminate the need for winter. Naturally, the same impeccable logic in reverse eliminates our need to recognize summer.

So join me in celebrating the new year (lower case) on December 21. We can cavort naked and proclaim the rites of spring, and – like true optimists – our new calendar can continue to recognize all of the primitive holidays eliminated in our hearts. In June, we can repeat the process and welcome the fall and its harvest.

Writing a blog that doesn’t criticize the Used Car Salesman in Chief in La casa Blanca makes me feel very cheerful. Obviously, spring is in the air.

Blog on!

Wild Bill
Optimist in Chief

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Of Course We Were Deceived

In the days prior to the invasion of Iraq, were we deceived by President George W. Bush? The answer is: YES! The president and his inner circle deliberately misled the American people into believing that the threat posed by Iraq to the United States and its allies was grave and imminent.

The president, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Advisor Rice and a small core of advisors in and out of government deliberately deceived us with the intent of taking us to war with Iraq. Each of them stated repeatedly that Saddam Hussein’s army had weapons of mass destruction and that he posed an imminent and grave threat to our nation and its allies.

Those same people are now deconstructing that argument and attempting to deceive us again by saying that because part of that argument has turned out to have been based on faulty intelligence that the entire argument falters because the CIA and the intelligence agencies of our allies were wrong so they did not deceive us. This is wrong!

It is very unsettling to think that our intelligence was as bad as it turned out to be, but that is an irrelevant part of the argument. The real question was – based on the intelligence available to the president – should he have taken the nation to war? Let us examine the question and, further, assume the CIA and our allies were correct in their estimates of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam had at his disposal chemical and biological weapons and he was seeking to reconstitute his nuclear capacity.

The real question at that point was did Iraq constitute a threat sufficient to get us into the quagmire that we face today? Giving Saddam the benefit of the doubt on these issues, there is no way that a decision to invade should have been made. First, chemical weapons are useful when attacking defenseless people such as the Kurds resident in Iraq. They are useless and counterproductive against any modern state such as the U.S., Israel or any Muslim state in the region friendly to the U.S. The Germans discovered this in World War I when the allies used the same weapons against them and when the wind turned and blew the gas on their own soldiers.

Without hesitation, Hitler would have used chemical weapons in World War II had he thought they would be effective. The Geneva Convention and other treaties notwithstanding, Germany didn’t use them because they are ineffective. Saddam knew that and our professional military leaders knew it. Using these weapons against our allies in the region would have been tantamount to suicide for Saddam and his nation. And Saddam, as we learned from his hiding in a rabbit hole, was certainly not intent on becoming a suicide victim.

Biological weapons, while potentially far more dangerous than chemical weapons, pose almost all of the same problems for nations that would use them. Its citizens are not immune to the effects, and certainly the U.S. and its allies would have been able to check any threat of use by Iraq with the greater threat of massive retaliation. President Bush and his advisors had access to military advisors who could have told them this.

Assuming that Saddam was attempting to buy yellow cake uranium in Africa was correct – which it was not – Saddam would have been years away from developing a nuclear weapon. President Bush should have known this. Certainly Defense Department and Energy Department officials would have been pleased to supply this information if the question had been asked.

That our intelligence on WMDs was wrong was irrelevant. Even had Saddam been armed with the weaponry he was charged with having, he posed no grave or imminent threat to us or our allies as a result of such possession.

On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists, and President Bush properly said we would go after them and hunt down and kill or capture every last one of them. The U.S. demanded that Taliban give up Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. They refused and we declared them to be the enemy. We assembled an in international coalition to fight the Taliban and chase down the leadership of al Qaeda. The American nation was behind the president almost to a person.

Shortly after that, the public relations campaign against Saddam began. It was not clear to many that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S. The false argument that there were WMDs and that everyone knew it was irrelevant. Again - was he an imminent threat was the real question?

Again, assuming he had these weapons, the United Nations and the first Bush and Clinton administrations were successfully containing Iraq with the sanctions and no-fly zone policies put in place after the Gulf War. Everything we have learned since the invasion has supported this conclusion.

Since our war leaders turned out not to be able to make their case on WMDs and in tying al Qaeda to Saddam’s government, the administration has dragged out the false argument that it is in our national security interests to promote democracy in Iraq as an appropriate reason fro the invasion and occupation. This has been an unmitigated disaster.

Muslims reject American interference even as many of them say they embrace some form of democracy. We are infidels and any government that comes out of our intervention will be viewed as illegitimate even if it meets the test of being democratic. Thus, the new government will be fair game for any rebels and jihadists so inclined.

All of the right wing pundits are slamming the Democrats in Congress for wanting to bring the troops home and are tarring them with the brush of Michael Moore and other left wing ideologues. The vast majority of those opposed to the war, including most Congressional Democrats, recognize the abject failure of the Bush Iraq War and occupation adventures but see that we simply can’t load up the boats tomorrow and bring them home.

Even Bush knows he’s totally lost his focus on the War on Terror and is looking for a way out of Iraq. The only question among mainstream people is the timing and condition of our withdrawal. The new Iraqi government must ultimately stand on its own, dependent on its own police and army. The way things are going now, the Shias and Kurds are running the show and are in no hurry to get us out of the fight with the Sunnis. The Kurds and Shias are going to inherit what they need from the war, relative autonomy and oil revenue. That the Sunnis, hated as they are by the other two major ethnic groups, are left with parched soil and no oil suits the other two’s interests almost perfectly.

We have created a power vacuum and are filling it ourselves; we must insist that it be filled by Iraqis sooner than later. Both Bush and the Democrats understand this. Bush wants to have a free hand in deciding when that is, and the Democrats want commitments as to when troop drawdown will begin in earnest – not just bringing home those added to the force during the election process.

The American people are beginning to fully comprehend the debacle that is happening in Iraq and no amount of right wing deception can restore the president’s sagging credibility. “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” It’s over.

Bush can save his presidency only by racing to the front in the direction that the American people are already marching. He better get at it soon; there are fewer followers every day.

Bush has created a calamity for the U.S. No one will deny that most Iraqis are personally better off – economically and politically – than under Saddam. But it is not clear that that the weakened state or states that will emerge from our folly will enhance our strategic position in the Middle East. It is likely that much greater instability from a bellicose Kurdish sector will enrage the Turks and others and a Shia tilt toward Iran - that is already evident - will weaken us greatly in the region.

All in all, this has been the greatest failure of any modern American presidency.

You bet we were deceived! You bet we are being deceived!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Happy Thanksgiving

I am very thankful today and wish the same for all who read these words.

On a personal level, I’m blessed with a loving wife with whom I have shared a comfortable and occasionally exciting life, three fine sons all of whom are happily married and completely independent from us and who need no real help from the old folks, eight grandchildren who are making their way through decent suburban school systems, and many great and good friends. All of these fine folks are progressing through life with no life threatening diseases or disabilities. As I look on Thanksgivings past, I see myself in the role of the grandfather in Norman Rockwell’s great W.W. II illustration depicting Freedom from Want.

We live in a truly great country under a wondrous system of government. Ever since the buildup to the Iraq War, I have been slamming President Bush and those who surround and support him. Regularly, often more than once a day, I write public pieces on this Blog that slam his policies and that make him out to be an incompetent leader. Daily, I share media reports with my friends that show high government officials to be deceivers and mean spirited people intent on action that I think is detrimental to the interests of the nation. I publicly deplore policies that shift national resources away from the truly needy to those who already have more than their fair share of the goods of life. And regularly I blast captains of industry as heartless and blind to the plight of the truly unfortunate.

Yet very few residents of this great land, including millions of people from other countries - many of whom are here illegally, are truly starving on this holiday of bounty. Government money – federal, state and local – and private charitable donations of time, food and money assure that even the least among us are fed and protected from the elements on this day. Obviously, we could do better and we must do more and must castigate officials and institutions not doing enough, but we and they do much.

For all I do – not the positive work of the saints who actually feed the needy and succor the poor – in yapping at the heels of the mighty, what truly makes America great is that there is no knock on my door in the middle of the night. I sleep without fear of President Bush, of Vice President Cheney, of the CIA and the FBI. I and you can speak the truth as we see it and walk down our street without fear from commissars or brown shirts of any brand.

So today I’ll take time from the things I disagree with to wish all those for whom I usually have no kind words and hope that they too have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Back at them tomorrow!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

What Me Worry?

Dick Cheney is thrashing about and trashing everyone with contrary opinions to his own regarding the Iraq War. He loved it when he was perceived as the eminence grise behind the `what me worry’ Alfred E. Newman in the White House, but now he’s working overtime to slash opponents of the war and appearing to defend the president. In actuality, his language leaves the president holding the bag for the war. “How dare they say the President would manipulate intelligence, etc., etc., etc.” Isn’t the Veep great defending the President whose war this now is - in spades. Never did Dick stand behind and whisper in the ear; no siree, not our Dick.

Jack Murtha’s not a bad guy, misguided, but not a bad guy, but the rest of you even thinking that the president would manipulate intelligence in order to start the war in Iraq. That’s shameful and dishonest to even let that thought cross your rotten, corrupt, little minds.

The boys in the La Casa Blanca seem to be settling in on a strategy of words; a strategy that makes no sense whatever. It’s okay for Democrat Congressmen to criticize, providing they say George didn’t cook the books. But they can’t criticize unless they come with an alternative.

There are only three choices in Iraq. Stay the course; pull out immediately; or pull out over time. And clearly the Democrats are beating the drums for the last, phased withdrawal. Frick and Frack jump through the ceiling when the phased withdrawal is mentioned as that’s the course they want to follow but can’t bring themselves to say. Obviously, we can’t stay until every Iraqi civilian is dead; we have to plan on leaving. And no matter who says or does it, the insurgents are well aware of our options. The only thing in question is the timing. Alfred E. Newman says we have to wait until the Iraqis can take over. Obviously, the Shias and the Kurds are perfectly willing to have us fight till the last Sunni, and unless we tell them we’re bugging, they’ll be content to let us bleed to death.

By stressing time phased withdrawal the Dems have stolen the administration’s thunder, so Dick and A. E. Newman have to say that’s a terrible idea. But it’s the only idea, and at least Dick knows it. How to get from here to there? Lay the war and the retreat at Frick’s doorstep and blame the cowardly liberals for forcing Frick out before he could finish the job. Just how damn poor is that? Plenty! And clever, too.

So as Dick slashes and burns and blames George for starting the fire, we’ll get out while Dick does his best to walk away from any role in the calamity that he was once proud to bask in reflected glory for having started and won. Obviously, Dick’s the first person in the lifeboat.

Give me a break.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Monday, November 21, 2005

Off with the SPLOGGERS

I can’t remember who said it or where I read it but someone mused that blogs are the nearest thing to what the founders intended when creating the first amendment to the Constitution. Sadly, over recent decades the mainstream media has failed the citizenry. The New York Times showed poor oversight of Judith Miller who was in the thrall of Washington insiders intent on attacking Iraq, and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post has been shown to have feet of clay by playing footsy with pretty much the same wrecking crew.

So blogs, fair and foul, fill the electronic ether with their frothing about George Bush, Michael Moore and a million and one other topics and readers have turned away from traditional media outlests - clearly under the control of special interests - and begun follow their favorite opinion makers. Right wing giants such as Drudge and Limbaugh are now seen as mere hacks for those who would turn us into a theocracy akin to Iran West, and poor Al Franken rails about the unfairness of it all while he throws equally foul bombs at Rush and Matt.

Quietly, small fry like Wild Bill, speaking only truth – as you well know – from the center of the political spectrum, are picking up readers one by one. Bill’s rants – actually calming oil on the water of nasty discourse – simply and gently labels them all idiots and calls for a new Enlightenment where reason rules once again. Sadly, Bill’s blog is being captured by the profit minded and evil SPLOGGERS intent on piggy backing on Bill’s pearls by showing how each of you, dear readers, can earn big bucks at home by merely licking closed envelopes to other suckers.

Bill has basked in the glow of your compliments and acknowledgement of his superior qualities and has chosen to ignore the very rare comments demonstrating the lack of analytical ability of a few, but that must all end. The SPLOGGERS are overwhelming the site, and I must restrict comments. I will know that you are virtually unanimous in your praise, so don’t feel badly about being unable to post it for all to see.

As long as Brennan’s Syndrome (Blogus Bovinus Wastus) forces me to grind out these gems, you’ll have them at your service and never have to comment. Of course you love Bill.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Humpty Dumpty

Colin Powell, no longer a member of the team, was the first to point out The Crockery Barn rule of international affairs: “You break it; you bought it.”

We just had to break that Iraqi crockery and now we can’t get out of the store without paying the bill. Iraq – really Humpty Dumpty – is now cracked and divided into three big pieces, Kurd, Shia, and Sunni, and we have no clue as to how to put it back together again. The president simply says we have to stay the course of holding the three pieces together. Liberals scream that we have to let go and let the pieces fall where they may. And new voices from the Democratic side and even some moderate Republicans are saying we’ve got to turn the cracked China over to the irate customers – all of whom are, at best, wary of each other.

It wasn’t as if George Bush wasn’t told by his own Secretary of State. Opponents of the war seized on Powell’s analogy as did even the diffident Democrats who supported the effort.

There appears to be no right answer. Simply staying the course plays into the hands of the insurgents and al Qaeda; they know that we have to go home someday, and they have the wherewithal to outwait us. Meeting the liberal demand by pulling out of the war immediately looks like a recipe for certain and immediate chaos and anarchy. The best answer – of a very poor lot - as the president hints and as moderates demand - staged withdrawal - appears to offer the only rational way out, but that could be merely postponing civil war.

George Bush broke the crockery. He’s trying hard to drag in everybody in sight saying they went shopping with him, but – sad for him – they all claim quite rightly that they were only looking in the window. It’s his war; he must admit error and find a way to get us out.

The Senate has taken and passed a vote of no confidence in George’s war. The people now see him as untrustworthy and by their poll numbers endorse the Senate’s view.

While the nature of the Congress has changed in the last couple of decades as the incumbents have learned to insulate themselves from recall by the people, the Republican moderates have got to take charge if George won’t. The ’06 election looms and threatens to spread the crockery shards all over the GOP loyalists.

George, just pay the bill. You broke; you own it. Start bringing the troops home now. It may not be a good way, but it’s the only way. Oh, and stop attacking people it only solidifies your spot in history as a failed president.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Friday, November 18, 2005

Charlie, We Hardly Knew You

Hands are being wrung everywhere; can nothing be done to stop the crazy right wing?

Can we do anything about confusing the teaching of evolution with the religiously inspired `intelligent design’? Can anything be done about the administration’s labeling of anyone not in agreement with its Iraq War policy as traitors? Is there hope in slowing our rush to reform the world in our image?

Of course there are things to be done to throw a monkey wrench into the vast right wing conspiracy. First and foremost, pop open a Bud and relax.

As post New Deal excesses in the sixties doomed the left, as rightist madness in Europe ended with a decades long discrediting of Fascism, as the obvious failures of Communism led to the implosion of the Soviet Union, as the take no prisoners actions of Joe McCarthy led inevitably to the end of the right in America in the 1950s, so it will be that the new Right will shoot itself in the foot in our time. In fact the first shots have already been fired.

The terribly sad Terri Schiavo affair awakened common sense in huge numbers of very conservative Evangelical Christians and undermined the credibility of President Bush and fallen House Majority Leader Tom DeLay with a wide swath of the right wing base.

The effort by zealots to discredit the science of Charles Darwin and to require that Creationism or its latest religiously inspired act all costumed in lab coats, Intelligent Design, which had most scientists everywhere going bonkers is now in full retreat in the face of the throw the bums out results of the Dover, PA School Board election. I can’t believe that the good common sense folks in the heart of the Heartland of Kansas are going to be far behind their brethren in Dover.

On that point, in today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer skewered his Intelligent Design buddies. Charles, as many of you know, is farther right than Atilla on most subjects, but even he cannot deny his own scientific education. The following link will allow you to enjoy one of the most direct assaults on moronic design I’ve ever seen. Way to go, Chuck!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701304.html?referrer=emailarticle

Yesterday, one of the true heavyweights from the national defense wing of the Democratic Party, Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, threw a wicked huge gob of crap into the right wing war machine fan by declaring the Iraq War a failure. As expected, the President and his draft dodging chicken hawk supporters went bananas, but, no longer surprisingly, the people haven’t budged from their course to find the war ill considered.

Oh, and then there was that attack on Social Security by the President. You remember that one, don’t you? Even the Pres acknowledged that he wasn’t trying to make it solvent but rather to privatize it. What happened to that bit of legerdemain? This is a sad one because we really do have to address the problems of long term funding of the program, but the obvious effort to kill the program cost Mr. Bush all of his election capital and the rest of us what was really needed.

Well it’s coming up on noon in the National Capital Area and Wild Bill hears the call of the lager in the fridge. So ya’all just kick back and relax; the neocons, libertarians and Evangelicals are all marching in different directions and fighting among themselves. It won’t be long now.

Whew, that was close; another few years and every street in the Country would have been renamed in honor of Ronald Reagan and we moderates couldn’t have found our way to the polling booths.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Huh?

If, as President Bush has stated repeatedly, the intelligence on Iraq was bad, why after recognizing this did he present the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, to CIA Director George Tenet? I have nothing against Tenet, but the award seems flaky if he goofed as badly as is now being trafficked about.

While the president is doing his damnedest to find his accessories before the fact and accomplices in his Iraq War, why wasn’t he looking for those same co-conspirators when he was taking his bows aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln when the mission was accomplished?

Even if we give him the point that the Congress had the same intelligence that he had when it authorized the war – which I definitely do not – and that President Bill Clinton declared Saddam a WMD owning menace, why should these officials be charged as accomplices? After all, Mr. Clinton used this intelligence to support his policy of containment and the Congress authorized Mr. Bush to use force, if he found it essential. They didn’t make a finding that we should attack.

The president keeps saying that the world’s intelligence agencies believed Saddam had chemical and biological agents. Why then did not France, Germany and so many other nations balk at attacking Iraq? Could it be that they thought containment was working? Facts on the ground support this position.

Instead of attacking Iraq, why did we not attack Iran or North Korea, two nations clearly more dangerous than Iraq? These countries had WMDs and were in search of nuclear capability – which North Korea has succeeded in developing. Could it be that Secretary Rumsfeld’s observation – reported by Bob Woodward in his book on the run up to the conflict – that Iraq had good targets have been the reason?

Is everyone aware that we’re approaching the number of American deaths in Iraq equal to those killed on 9/11?

There were twenty-some terrorists involved in 9/11. Are there more terrorists in the world today than on that date? I don’t know, but I suspect so.

These questions are not intended to be exhaustive but simply representative. I’m too busy to write extensively; just think up your own.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Saturday, November 12, 2005

A Drowning Man

President George W. Bush yesterday corrupted one of the most sacred holidays of the United States by using it as an opportunity to attack the patriotism of the critics of his Iraq War policy.

That Mr. Bush has been floundering is beyond question, but by his low road attack on those who questioned his decision to invade Iraq he has announced that he is drowning. Iraq has turned out to be a disaster. Two thousand American deaths, many more thousand wounded and injured, twenty thousand innocent Iraqis dead and countless wounded, our armed forces stretched and floundering in an environment in which they are at great disadvantage, and, of course, our treasury bleeding dollars – all this and more are the fault of George W. Bush.

Now Mr. Bush is seeking company in the cold dark water and is attempting to drag in the Congress and especially the Democrats into the deep with him. They had the same intelligence and they voted for the resolution in favor of the attack. Sounds Good! But it won’t wash!

The Congress, including many Republicans, hardly wanted to invade Iraq. Anyone with half a memory and brain will recall the pressure being applied to the legislators by George Bush’s administration. The hysterical performance by Bush’s Secretary of State at the U.N. in New York was merely the most outstanding act among thousands describing the imminent danger posed by Saddam. If that wasn’t a cooked presentation there never has been one.

As he fell back from imminent the danger of weapons of mass destruction to the folly of bringing democracy into the heart of a civilization that rejects us and our values, George Bush has done everything in his power to spread the blame for his fiasco. But yesterday he reached a new low by invoking the casualties already suffered and the deaths yet to come and laying them at his critics’ doors.

Shame on you, President Bush!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Saturday, November 05, 2005

I Plead Not Guilty

President Bush and his minion are doing everything in their power to involve others in their ill conceived decision to attack Iraq. I don’t blame them; who would want to claim parenthood of that poor orphan? Unfortunately, they’ve been partially successful in sharing the responsibility in this public paternity play.

Those opposed to the war, especially Democratic politicians, have done a poor job in keeping the finger of public opinion pointed squarely at the president, his closest advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, Bolton, et al) leading neoconservatives in the private sector (Pearle, Podhoritz, the Kristols, etc.) and on leaders in the Evangelical Christian movement who have willingly sold their poor flocks on the terrible notion that doing bad was a good thing in this war.

Opponents of the war are spending their energy trying to determine whether the pre war intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and programs was manufactured or manipulated by the administration in order to support the strike on Iraq. That’s a great question deserving close examination and an honest answer. But it permits the president and his merry band of clackers to fire the bovine waste into the fan and cover his critics with the result.

The Democrats and the rest of us opposed to the war have permitted ourselves to be herded by the administration onto its team of co-conspirators in the effort to topple the Baathist regime in Iraq. It’s really quite silly to blame Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, John Kerry, the Republicans and most of the Democrats in Congress, and poor little old Wild Bill for believing that Saddam had WMDs, the stated reason for the invasion. While most of the silly people in this list rail against inclusion on it, I ask why should this label us as co-conspirators with the president in the run up to the invasion?

That the CIA and the other world’s intelligence agencies believed Saddam had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and that he was seeking nuclear capacity and that those in Congress who supported the overthrow of the Iraqi regime had virtually the same information as the administration is a very handy debating tool of the president, but in reality it is merely a red herring to draw our attention away from the culpability of the small cabal of insiders that the public is finally zeroing in on which has brought death to more than 2,000 of our fighting men and women, killed 20,000 Iraqi civilian, and that is now approaching the quarter of a trillion dollars in wasted treasure.

The real question was and remains how much of a threat did Saddam’s Iraq pose to the United States? In retrospect, it is clear that the various inspection efforts by international bodies coupled with the degradation caused by American and allied activities in the no fly zones established in the wake of 1991 Gulf War were working very well in keeping the Iraqi government in check and in a weakened state. The real question should not be whether Saddam had WMDs but did he pose a threat to the U.S. sufficient for us to wage a preventive war against his government?

That last question is the one that must be examined and seems not to be on the radar screens of most opponents of the conflict and Congressional Committees looking it. Did the administration overstate the threat against us and our allies? If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the argument that virtually everyone thought he had WMDs and thus war was justified, we, along with George Bush and his inner circle, are doomed to be culpable for the resulting fiasco. The real question that must be answered by the Senate Intelligence Committee is whether the Administration manipulated intelligence to show an immediate threat against us, our forces, or our allies.

As long as the president can get away with saying the Congress was looking at the same information available to he when they voted to support the war, he has them where he wants them. The standard the opponents should be seeking is whether there was an imminent threat to our country or its allies.

Buying into the bovine waste that we are exporting Western style democracy as a fall back to failure to find WMDs or – most importantly – a direct and imminent threat to us or our friends is fatal to the real evil in this case – preventive rather preemptive war. It is in this that the conspirators – the president, his advisors on military and security matters, and his in the war supporters in and out of government, especially Evangelical Christian leaders - have done their greatest damage.

Even assuming that Saddam had his WMDs and that the war could be justified in religious terms, the failure to find these weapons and the threat to us these weapons represented clearly means that, in violation of international law, we executed a preventive attack on an innocent nation. No matter how reprehensible the leader and his administration was we attacked a nation that posed no real threat. If that is true – and I believe it is – we should be moving out as quickly as possible.

Evangelical Christians have been misled and they should be reassessing their position. They are supporting what has turned out to be an immoral and illegal attack on a nation that could do us no substantial harm. That the invaded nation was led by an immoral regime is no excuse for sending our men and women into harms way and to strain our armed forces to the point of danger to our country. And that says nothing abut the material cost that could have been used for any number of more worthy purposes.

Our goal should be to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and to get on with hunting down the jihadists who are pledging to kill us.

Blog on!

Wild Bill