Ten years later, still fighting over Powell’s WMD speech

From the Washington Post:

On Feb. 5, 2003, at the request of President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations and made the case that Iraq possessed and was concealing weapons of mass destruction. Though it soon became clear that the speech was deeply flawed, Powell and other members of the Bush team still spar over how it came to be and who is to blame.

Click here for contradictory, backbiting excerpts from the their memoirs.

Ten years later, I'm still infuriated.

In March of 2003, we invaded Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts that the desert nation had weapons of mass destruction, and that there was a very good chance their dictator Saddam Hussein was going to give those weapons to terrorists.  As we all now know at this point, that turned out not to be true.

And what pisses me off the most was that this was known at the time.  It was known by UN weapons inspectors.  It was known by the IAEA.  It was known by British intelligence.  It was even known by US intelligence, but the verdict is still out about whether this information was consciously suppressed in order to craft lies, or if it was willfully ignored because all the important Bush administration players had made up their minds about Saddam's WMD, and evidence be damned.  Even worse, all these contrary views made it into the press, on the front page outside the US, and on the interior pages in the US.  But the info was out there for anybody who knew how to use Google.

Alas, most Americans chose not to do any research on this most important of topics, and patriotically lined up in support of the invasion, which was illegal whether Saddam had WMD or not.  But what the hell, 'Merica's the greatest mf'ing country in the world, and when we go to war, we're always right!  Dissenters such as myself were branded as anti-American, or unpatriotic, or worse, traitors.  Evidence didn't matter in the White House, and it didn't matter in the streets.

It was all pretty sick and disgusting in retrospect.  Washington failed spectacularly to do its job, and the American public cheered them on.  Indeed, the whole country failed.  And all I could do was watch what became a slow motion train wreck.  Do you know how depressingly weird it is for everybody to believe something you KNOW isn't true?  And that people will die as a consequence?  And then to watch as people die, thousands of them, because virtually everybody believes something that ISN'T TRUE?!? 

So yeah, I'm still infuriated a decade later.  The Bush administration, supported by the Congress and the public, either lied about WMD, or was too incompetent to understand that gut instincts don't trump facts.  Either way, it's the biggest national failure of my lifetime.  Maybe the worst in American history.  And people were big dicks about it, both while it was happening, and for years afterward.  When does this country start to look at itself in the mirror again? 

My best bet is that we put Iraq into the Native American genocide and Jim Crow file; that is, we just won't think about it.  It's the American way, after all.

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