Sunday, December 18, 2005
And So It Continues...Part Three
In their never-ending quest to justify the Iraq invasion ex post facto, the Chicago Tribune continues its war on truth and decency.
The latest installment of the Apology for the Road to War series was today, another exercise in the old bait-and-switch trick. We’re going in to find WMDs…no WMDs? He was a bad guy anyway!
Indeed, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. But, as Martin Luther King said, the greatest purveyor of violence on Earth is my own government.
Saddam Hussein didn’t give target lists to Indonesia in the sixties which helped them butcher a quarter of a million people, nor did he aid them in the seventies and help them erase another quarter of a million civilians in East Timor. A similar amount of civilians died in the eighties as a result of U.S.-funded and trained death squads in Central America.
I pray another country doesn’t invade the United States and cite those figures.
So why didn’t we invade Indonesia? How about North Korea, where untold hundreds of thousands have died at the hands of the merciless dictator, and where millions have died in a preventable famine? How about invading the Sudan, where 50 to 80 thousand have perished and a million been displaced just in the last two years at the hands of the government’s air force and the Janjaweed Arab militia? Why didn’t we invade Cambodia in the late seventies when 1.7 million died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge?
As I have said before, the U.S. doesn’t invade nations for human rights reasons. Those certainly weren’t the reasons given by the president:
Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.
--President Bush, March 19, 2003, address to the nation
So what was this war about, now?
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 9:32 AM 
