The Center for Budget and Strategic Assessments report, “The War in Iraq: An Interim Assessment” (pdf), opens with a quote from Winston Churchill.
“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.
The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”
Despite a compliant media burying their words or ignoring them entirely, many experts voiced similar concerns to and about the Bush administration’s campaign of lies to illegally invade Iraq. Now that the United States has troops and no-bid contractors reportedly robbing the country blind in place, the Bush goons finally embrace this prescient advise but disseminate it to once again manipulate an increasingly sceptical, war-weary public into accepting a “stay the course” attitude towards their War on Terror “struggle against violent extremism.”
Where are these voices now that the campaign to shock and awe Iran is on its fast track? As Seymour Hersh reported 17 January 2005 in The Coming Wars:
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”
Intelligence officers deemed unfriendly were purged from their respective agencies and replaced with Bush acolytes, attacks were waged on critical analysts, academics, and journalists in the U.S. and abroad, and Bush ordered the secret surveillance of such terrorist groups as the Quakers. The Senate Judiciary Committee intends to address the NSA monitoring in a hearing on Monday to which only Alberto Gonzales has been invited to testify, ignoring the many other architects of this ongoing plan to shred the Constitution and grant Bush unlimited executive powers.
United for Peace and Justice is mobilising a march for 29 April in New York City. If a dumbed down factory worker like me is aware this bombing campaign on Iran seems to be set for March, I have to wonder what in hell they’re thinking. Donald Rumsfeld studied Nazi strategy and transformed his military to mirror “the unprecedented and revolutionary way that they mixed new and existing capabilities.” The antiwar movement has only to recall the last 6 years of war-based-on-lies strategy successfully implemented by this administration, and the failure of mass marches to stop them, to realise it needs to devise new, revolutionary ways to address this looming disaster.
The first act it could take would be to call out Ryan Lizza of The New Republic and Rich Lowry of National Review for the pissants they are in attacking Cindy Sheehan’s character on Washington Journal on 2 February.
The notion that Sheehan is the antiwar movement’s only spokesperson should be dispelled by spotlighting others. There should be small strategic contingents in place ready to be sent at a moment’s notice to hearings and other events in the public eye, such as the hearing taking place tomorrow, where they could be protesting the unlawfull surveillance of antiwar activists and other Bush critics. One day at a time, but for pity’s sake, get in the moment.