In 1997 oil industry and media right-wingers formed the Project for the New American Century (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc). They immediately proposed military action to depose Saddam Hussein, occupy Iraq, and assert U.S. domination over the Middle East. When Bush became president they took over the country and sought an event they could use to elicit American support for their Iraq invasion.
The pack of lies that these PNAC folks used to justify the sacrifice of American and Iraqi lives in their oil war (WMDs, nuclear threats, Iraq links to 9-11) has been discredited in congressional report after report. The 2002 Downing Street memo shows that the Bush Administration fixed the intelligence to justify invasion. Wolfowitz confirmed this when stating that war was necessary because Iraq is swimming in oil. Even Colin Powell described his performance at the U.N. to justify the Iraq invasion as a blot on his career. Bush supporters still promote the lies even as Bush himself claims repeated reports exposing his lies offer nothing new.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing” (Edmund Burke). The Republican Congress remains silent as people die in Iraq, terrorism is promoted, science is abused, deficits spiral, the environment is pillaged, plundered and polluted, human health is undermined, and social programs are gutted to subsidize corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy.
Good men and women should respond: a vote for rubber stamp Republicans means continuing the insanity.
Alan Journet, Ph.D.
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