Wednesday, November 02, 2005

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us

It's rather fun reading about how the Republican leadership of the Senate was shocked and dismayed that Harry Reid would invoke a rule requiring a closed session over the "investigation" of whether or not the Bush Administration manipulated (i.e., LIED) about the information used to justify the invasion of Iraq. According to Dr. Bill, the Republican Majority Leader (probably soon to be indicted himself for a Martha Stewart-style insider stock trading, then lying about it scheme), this was just a grandstanding act by Reid and he'll NEVER be able to trust Reid again.

I guess what's fun about it is to see the utter hypocrisy of the Big Elephants as they are in crisis mode. Harriett ("George Bush is the most intelligent man I ever met") Meirs got eaten alive the by extreme right wing of the party (aka the American Taliban), "Scooter" Libby's been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for perjury (and NOW the Elephants are talking about "presumption of innocence"--where was that during Whitewater and Clinton's impeachment?) and now the Democrats have decided to play hardball, kicking the Elephants right where it hurts as a means of getting them moving on looking into things they obviously don't want coming to light. On top of all of this mess, now we find out that the CIA has got "secret" prisons around the world where they keep high-end terror suspects and, even worse, have official sanction to use interrogation techniques that we would probably scream and yell about if someone else used them on our troops captured in wartime.

Yeah, I know, these guys are bad, they're evil, they like blowing up innocent civilians along with our troops, but why are we turning our heads to legalized torture? That's why the recent scandals in Iraq and Guantanimo are so shocking, because the world looks at us and EXPECTS us to follow the rules that we want followed with our guys; when we don't follow the rules and it gets out, we look even more hypocritical and foolish than usual. The Big W blew his, and our, chance to look good in the world after 9/11 by using the World Trade Center disaster as an excuse to take out Saddam Hussein and get a toehold in the Arab world. First it was WMDs, then it was to "liberate" the Iraqi people and set up and spread "democracy" in the Middle East, now the rationale seems to be about fighting all these terrorists that have magically popped up in Iraq (who weren't there before we invaded, by the way, no matter what W and his cronies have said).

Now right-wingers are saying that the recent statements by the new Iranian hard-liner President (yes, he WAS elected, believe it or not) that Israel needs to be "wiped off the map" is yet ANOTHER reason for us to have gone into and stayed in Iraq, so that we can eventually encourage democracy there (i.e., a government a bit more friendly to us). How about this scenario, that Iran, faced with an openly hostile and bellicose U.S. on its border, with hard-liners talking about invading Iran to prevent the spread of nuclear material and weapons (sound familiar?), decided to elect someone who wanted to stand up and let the infidels know where they stood? Is it possible that, had we NOT invaded Iraq and opened an outpost there, that the Iranians MIGHT have moved more and more towards the center? That maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't feel so threatened?

According to W and Condi, the answer to that is NAAAHHHH.