Roadkill Journal

TIME TO STOP POINTING FINGERS -

AND START COUNTING BLESSINGS

It's the fight "we" love to fight. It's got all the ingredients: Scary technology, political intrigue, blurred, not quite 20-20 hindsight, success in failure and failure in success.

The war "we" maybe didn't have to fight. Maybe... And the excuse we used to talk "ourselves" into it.

We didn't need an excuse. In terms of International Law, Saddam Hussein's regime provided plenty of justification through repeated violations of the cease-fire agreement of the First Gulf War.

But somehow "legal" wasn't enough, or so the war's supporters thought. It had to be popular.

Enter the worse-case scenario. Exit common sense.

It ought to be obvious that piecing together the activities of a group - any group - that wishes to conceal those activities is a dicey proposition. Criminal gangs, rouge Nations, your neighbor with the pot patch in the spare room, it's all the same. Guesswork, the occasional lucky clue, and the "testimony" of those who claim insider knowledge but deny insider responsibility: All add up to cases subject to interpretation.

In the case of Iraq's weapons, conventional and unconventional, the worst-case was sold and eagerly bought.

The troops went in prepared for the worst, expecting to be hit with at the very least poison gas.

It didn't happen. There's your first blessing.

Then our forces turned the country upside down and found... Next to nothing. No huge ready to go weapons industry, no vast hidden stockpiles of weapons reported destroyed or never admitted to. Only a few odd, mostly deteriorated chemical munitions and some fuel-grade uranium already known to exist. A few pieces of a lab bench scale centrifuge.

Junk.

In two and a half years, there have been no significant unconventional attacks. Nobody's been gassed, infected, or irradiated. There's another blessing.

What I want to hear from George W Bush:

"I was wrong about Iraq's weapons programs. I looked at the world situation and the evidence and I did what leaders do: I led. I think we made the better choice."

Leaders lead. Every war this Nation ever fought was sold to the public using facts later seen to be less than factual in some aspect or other. Part of the President's job is to articulate policies he thinks are in the Nation's best interest. It would be naive to insist the absolute truth and the National interest are always synonymous.

Going to war isn't done by a recipe, like baking a cake. It's an act of faith. So conquer we must, if our cause it be just...

What I want to hear from the invertebrates in Congress who voted yes and now say they meant "yes, but..."

"We voted based on our own views. We could have asked more questions and we didn't. We and we alone are responsible for the positions we took, the information we accepted, and the votes we cast."

To the few of us that got this "right" from the get-go: Just shut up. I told you so isn't a position, it's an irritation.

Finally, to the neocon rearguard - the ones who use NewsMax as a homepage:

Stop pointing to those bits and pieces and yelling WMD! WMD! And start counting those blessings.

Start hoping you really were wrong, wrong, wrong. Shout out loud "I'm glad I was wrong!"



There is after all another possibility. Let's say those large stockpiles of weapons we were told about actually existed.

We didn't find them.

They are still there, or??? They have been removed.

What if they have been removed? Where are they? Syria? Your backyard, Mr. Believer? How about in Detroit, Senator Levin?

This might have gone far worse. It still could. If you pray, pray it doesn't.