The Emperor has no uniform...
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: 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 his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have
achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of
Baghdad.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051004A.shtml
The War is Lost
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 10 May 2004
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 we are
willing to admit it –– 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.
The worst, amazingly, is yet to come. A new battery
of photographs and videotapes, as yet unreleased,
awaits over the horizon of our abused understanding.
These photos and videos, also from the Abu Ghraib
prison, are reported to show U.S. soldiers gang raping
an Iraqi woman, U.S. soldiers beating an Iraqi man
nearly to death, U.S. troops posing, smirks affixed,
with decomposing Iraqi bodies, and Iraqi troops under
U.S. command raping young boys.
George W. Bush would have us believe these horrors
were restricted to a sadistic few, and would have us
believe these horrors happened only in Abu Ghraib. Yet
reports are surfacing now of similar treatment at
another U.S. detention center in Iraq called Camp
Bucca. According to these reports, Iraqi prisoners in
Camp Bucca were beaten, humiliated, hogtied, and had
scorpions placed on their naked bodies.
In the eyes of the world, this is America today. It
cannot be dismissed as an anomaly because it went on
and on and on in the Abu Ghraib prison, and because
now we hear of Camp Bucca. 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 our
definition of freedom.
The beginnings of actual political fallout began to
find its way into the White House last week.
Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the House
Democrats’ most vocal defense hawk, joined Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi to declare that the conflict is
“unwinnable.” Murtha, a Vietnam veteran, rocked the
Democratic caucus when he said at a leader’s luncheon
Tuesday that the United States cannot win the war in
Iraq.
“Unwinnable.” Well, it only took about 14 months.
Also last week, calls for the resignation of Defense
Secretary Don Rumsfeld became strident. 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." Representative Charlie
Rangel, a leading critic of the Iraq invasion, has
filed articles of impeachment against Rumsfeld.
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 accusation 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 interfere. 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 by Paul Bremer, the American
administrator of Iraq, 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 its 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 left 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 his torturing. The "rape rooms,"
often touted by Bush as justification for the
invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the
torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence
with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but
George W. Bush's ridiculous “War on Terror” as a
whole.
I say ridiculous because this “War on Terror” was
never, ever something we were going to win. What began
on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its
loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy
of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because
of the complete failure of moral leadership at the
highest levels.
We saw a prime example of this during Friday’s farce
of a Senate hearing into the Abu Ghraib disaster which
starred Don Rumsfeld. From his bully pulpit spoke
Senator Joe Lieberman, who parrots the worst of Bush’s
war propaganda with unfailingly dreary regularity.
Responding to the issue of whether or not Bush and
Rumsfeld should apologize for Abu Ghraib, Lieberman
stated that none of the terrorists had apologized for
September 11.
There it was, in a nutshell. There was the idea, oft
promulgated by the administration, that September 11
made any barbarism, any extreme, any horror brought
forth by the United States acceptable, and even
desirable. There was the institutionalization of
revenge as a basis for policy. Sure, Abu Ghraib was
bad, Mr. Lieberman put forth. But September 11
happened, so all bets are off.
Thus fails the “War on Terror.” September 11 did not
demand of us the lowest common denominator, did not
demand of us that we become that which we despise and
denounce. September 11 demanded that we be better,
greater, more righteous than those who brought death
to us. September 11 demanded that we be better, and in
doing so, we would show the world that those who
attacked us are far, far less than us. That would have
been victory, with nary a shot being fired.
Our leaders, however, took us in exactly the
opposite direction.
Every reason to go to Iraq has failed to retain even
a semblance of credibility. Every bit of propaganda
Osama bin Laden served up to the Muslim world for why
America should be attacked and destroyed has been
given credibility by what has taken place in Iraq.
Victory in this “War on Terror,” a propaganda war from
the beginning, has been given to the September 11
attackers by the hand of George W. Bush, and by the
hand of those who enabled his incomprehensible
blundering.
The war is lost.
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William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead
writer for t r u t h o u t. He is a New York Times and
international bestselling author of two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
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