Top 10 Reasons for Invading Iraq
1. Political Power – the entire progress of the war (or lack thereof) has been tied to the electoral calendar and to winning elections (or new strategies erected in reaction to losing elections – a la the surge) by fear mongering politicians hectoring the public – damning anyone who disagreed with them a traitor while consistently hiding their own political connivance, malfeasance and graft behind either the bravery of the troops in the field or ever expanding claims of national security.
2. Greed and Profiteering – While crying national interest and defensive necessity, notice they only ever seem to discern these necessities in activities which tend to conform to their prejudices and further their own financial interests. So even if God’s will and the nation’s interests are completely betrayed by their ensuing actions they manage to show a profit anyway.
3. Irrational Optimism – A belief unsecured by facts that just a little guidance and nudge at the point of a gun will turn every enemy into a good republican or at least a bad democrat. Meanwhile nations that have never known democracy are dying to receive it or will die in the process of our giving it to them if they don’t.
4. Religious zealotry – A peculiar, highly selective and often contradictory mélange of Old and New Testament Biblical prophesies half baked together. These are manifest in a religious hate and cultural bigotry that can see no human value in other peoples’ lives different from their own.
5. The Bully Syndrome – The desire to attack Saddam Hussein not because he was the strongest challenge to our country but precisely because he was the weakest and most despised and represented the least* potent threat to our nation’s security. This is the secret genesis of the bully’s code. For the flipside of bully behavior is a deep insecurity that builds slowly until it can generally only be assuaged by violent behavior.
6. Unreasoning Fear - Those who haven’t the capacity of mind to deal with the complexity of a world their experience can’t comprehend are tireless in search of perceived weakness in others that they may exploit to justify their own fears and prejudices. These they intimidate and lash out vengefully against, especially those least able of defending themselves, even when it ultimately hurts them more than the ones they are attacking.
7. Neo Conservatives – Twisted long nurtured delusions of world domination into manifest destiny while literally attempting to remake American policy into a lesser adjunct of Israel’s.
8. Cheney – Wanted to enrich himself and his buddies and live out his own fantasies of unchecked power, reverse philanthropy, torture, media manipulation and secret political domination without the inconvenience of ethics or intolerable burden of democratic accountability.
9. Rumsfeld – Just loved the idea of fighting wars though he hadn’t the faintest idea or least fortitude as to how to do so successfully.
10. Bush – Possessed a visceral urge to undo or redo or outdo the greatest triumph of his father’s presidency without knowing exactly how or why.
Given this nebulae of self-delusion, paranoia and self-interested dishonesty, is it really any wonder that the entire rationale for this war should have evaporated into thin air at the very moment of its instigation? Or that it has been continued indefinitely ever since as a war without essential purpose, potential gain or effectual end?
It is the clearest example in our history of a war being waged merely for war’s own sake, purely to sate the moral and mental weakness of our leaders. They have left us mired in a vicious war of preemptive American imperialism and aggression fought for no good or just or even vaguely coherent reason, not of necessity but merely because we could rather than needed to.
As it limps painfully along it has become vaguely reminiscent of one of those futile, pointless, punitive wars of ages past, so redolent of false glory and fading empire, undertaken by England (or some other power at any other time) at the end of the last century and the winding down of the British Empire – two things which perhaps not just coincidentally arrived nearly simultaneously.
So stumbling into its fifth year there is still no discernable national interest and benefit that can be found to justify this boondoggle, this toxic blood and oil war, either in our having started it for no good reason or in continuing it so long to so little purpose. Though its total costs and losses (with no mitigating benefits to assuage them) to the nation are already incalculable and mounting worse by the day, the only persuasive reason its promoters have left for our staying the course in Iraq is not so things will turn out well but only so that in leaving we won’t make this godawful mess they made even worse.
Strangely this is what has come to pass for “winning” or “victory” in the small minds and hearts of this war’s few remaining supporters and the drooling sycophants that still back them.
