Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Weapons of mass deception

Commentary by Dick Dorworth


By DICK DORWORTH
Express Staff Writer

Dick Dorworth

"I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so."

—Romain Rolland

"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."

—George Santayana

"George Bush has been an incompetent failure his entire life."

—Cindy Sheehan

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. Even when it is inescapable, necessary, or a war brought unasked to your doorstep (like the war on your doorstep if you are an Iraqi citizen), war is an abomination, an utter failure of the spirit, heart and intelligence of humanity. To claim that war is honorable, glorious, ennobling or anything but an unmitigated evil is to engage in profound deception. Whether that dishonesty is limited to the self or to a broader audience it is a matter of serious moral, practical and social consequence.

At this writing nearly 1900 Americans have lost their lives in Iraq. Another 15,000 Americans have been wounded, many of them horribly. At least 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, though the toll is likely much higher, and an unknown and unknowable number of Iraqis have been wounded, many of them dreadfully. A primary reason it is difficult to get an exact figure on the carnage in Iraq was succinctly summed up by American General Tommy Franks who said, "We don't do body counts."

Body counts are perhaps the ultimate truth of war. We don't do body counts. We don't do truth. The last time the United States immersed itself in the bright shining lie of a war it could neither justify nor win, we did body counts. That was in Vietnam, and the American public's awareness of the numbers of bodies piling up in Vietnam was a key element in shaming the country into shutting that war down. The more the citizenry knows about the reality and true cost of war the less willing they are to support it. We don't do body counts in Iraq because deception is easier than truth. Deception is integral to the American strategy of war in Iraq. It always was.

Deception is a weapon George Bush has used against the citizens of America throughout his presidency. Consider these past assurances to the nation used as reasons to invade Iraq:

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

—State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

—Address to the Nation, March 17, 2003

Bush and his dangerous and deceptive cadre of lock-step sycophants covered themselves in this garbage in a monstrous deception used to justify invading a sovereign nation that posed no threat to the U.S.

Deception is a weapon of mass destruction, in this case the destruction of the lives and families of some 1900 Americans, some 200 of the "coalition" armies, untold thousands of Iraqis, unimaginable injuries to unknown thousands of innocent collaterally damaged civilians, the confidence of the American citizenry in its leadership, the credibility of the Bush administration and the collateral damage of the credibility of America in the eyes of the world. And we should not forget the hundreds of billions of taxpayer's dollars that have gone to Iraq (and Halliburton) that could be better used in America for education, health care, transportation, housing, and the environment and, in a crisis, disaster relief.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just as there was no connection between Iraq and the Saudi Arabians who flew commandeered airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Oil was the reason for invading Iraq, and now the man who lied to America about this is rationalizing the continuing war by saying those who have already died for a lie must be honored by more Americans dying for the same ever more transparent lie and, of course, to protect Iraq's oil from "the terrorists."

We found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but we uncovered an enormous stockpile of lethal weapons of mass deception in America. They go by the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Powell and Chalabi, among others.

Many Americans are mad as hell at being deceived and tricked into the war in Iraq.

The financial costs and the human casualties continue to grow, wasted dollars and wasted lives, victims of weapons of mass deception.




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