The War is Lost. The War is Lost. The War is Lost.

WilliamPitt

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Thu May-06-04 05:32 PM
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The War is Lost. The War is Lost. The War is Lost.

We have traveled a long, dark, strange road since the attacks of September 11. We have all suffered, we have all known fear and anger, and sometimes hatred. Many of us have felt – probably more than are willing to admit it – many of us have felt at one time or another a desire for revenge, so deep was the wound inflicted upon us during that wretched, unforgettable Tuesday morning in September of 2001.

But we have come now to the end of a week so awful, so terrible, so wrenching that the most basic moral fabric of that which we believe is good and great – the basic moral fabric of the United States of America – has been torn bitterly asunder. We are awash in photographs of Iraqi men – not terrorists, just people – Lying in heaps on cold floors with leashes around their necks. We are awash in photographs of men chained so remorselessly that their backs are arched in agony, men forced to masturbate for cameras, men forced to pretend to have sex with one another for cameras, men forced to endure attacks from dogs, men with electrodes attached to them as they stand, hooded, in fear of their lives.

For the world entire, this is America today. It cannot be dismissed as an anomaly, for these reasons. It went on and on and on in the Abu Ghraib prison. And according to the British press, there are some 30 other cases of torture and humiliation under investigation. The Bush administration went out of its way to cover up this disgrace, declaring secret the Army report on these atrocities. That, pointedly, is against the rules and against the law. You can’t call something classified just because it is embarrassing and disgusting. It was secret, but now it is out, and the whole world has been shown the dark, scabrous underbelly of George Bush’s definition of freedom.

The beginnings of actual political fallout over this mess has begun to find its way into the White House. Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the House Democrats’ most visible defense hawk, joined Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to make public his previously private statements that the conflict is “unwinnable.” This new approach came as lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol grappled with how to respond to the stunning photos of Iraqi prisoners being abused, and braced for debate over a $25 billion additional appropriation for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pelosi’s most trusted ally on military issues and a senior defense appropriator, Murtha, a Vietnam veteran, sent a shockwave through the Caucus when he told Members at a leader’s luncheon Tuesday that under the current Bush administration course the United States cannot win the war in Iraq. The term “unwinnable” is widely viewed among Members as a major shift in the Caucus’ message on the conflict, especially from a veteran, pro-military Member who supported the U.S. role in Iraq.

Unwinnable. Well, it only took about 14 months.

Also in the Capitol today, Pelosi along with several other Democrats called for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation because of the Iraq torture scandal. Pelosi accused Rumsfeld of being "in denial about Iraq," and said U.S. soldiers "are suffering great casualties and injuries, and American taxpayers are paying an enormous price" because Rumsfeld "has done a poor job as secretary of defense." "Secretary Rumsfeld must resign," she said. Representative Charlie Rangel, a lead critic of the Iraq invasion, said Thursday that he will seek Rumsfeld's impeachment if the administration's chief war planner does not resign.

So there’s the heat. But let us consider the broader picture here in the context of that one huge word: Unwinnable. Why did we do this in the first place. There have been several reasons offered over the last 16 months for why we needed to do this thing. It started, for real, in January 2003 when George W. Bush said in his State of the Union speech that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX, 30,000 munitions to deliver this stuff, and that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger to build nuclear bombs.

That reason has been scratched off the list because, as has been made painfully clear now, there are no such weapons in Iraq. The Niger claim, in particular, has caused massive embarrassment for America because it was so farcical, and has led to a federal investigation of this White House because two administration officials took revenge upon Joseph Wilson’s wife for Wilson’s exposure of the lie. Next on the list was September 11, and the oft-repeated allusions that Saddam Hussein must have been at least partially responsible. That one collapsed as well – Bush himself had to come out and say Saddam had nothing to do with it.

Two reasons down, so the third must be freedom and liberty for the Iraqi people. Once again, however, facts have interfered with the quest. America does not want a democratic Iraq, because a democratic Iraq would quickly become a Shi’ite fundamentalist Iraq allied with the Shi’ite fundamentalist nation of Iran, a strategic situation nobody with a brain wants to see come to pass. It has been made clear that whatever the new Iraqi government comes to look like, it will have no power to make any laws of any kind, it will have no control over the security of Iraq, and it will have no power over the foreign troops which occupy their soil. This is, perhaps, some bizarre new definition of democracy not yet in the dictionary, but it is not democracy by any currently accepted definition I have ever heard of.

So…the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed. What is left? The one reason that has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.

And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do the torturing. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad, and we have done so for all the world to see.

This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but this ridiculous War on Terror as a whole. Every reason to go to Iraq has failed to retain even a semblance of credibility. Every bit of propaganda Osama bin Laden gave the Muslim world for why America should be attacked and destroyed has been validated by what has taken place in Iraq. Victory in this War on Terror, a propaganda war from the beginning, has been handed to the September 11 attackers by the hand of George W. Bush. The war is lost. The war is lost. The war is lost.