With Saddam Hussein deposed from Baghdad and Iraqis increasingly voicing gratitude to intervening American troops, the earliest and fiercest advocates of the war claimed vindication today. Chief among them was Ken Adelman, a former arms control director in the Reagan administration, who predicted in February of last year that American forces would enjoy “a cakewalk” in Iraq. That remark, with similar predictions by other hawkish former and current government officials, was ridiculed by a flood of commentators and retired generals in the early days of the war in Southern Iraq, when Mr. Hussein’s paramilitary fighters seemed to be putting up stiffer-than-expected resistance…. Mr. Adelman, reached in Paris today, said the critics of the war plan could not argue with success. He scorned recent complaints by retired generals and military analysts that the Pentagon had deployed too few troops or was seeking to take over Iraq “on the cheap.”…. Mr. Adelman said he hoped that “fearmongers” would derive some lessons about leadership from the seizure of Baghdad. President Bush had not been dissuaded by the criticism, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain boldly stared down public opinion in his country, he said….”I hope it emboldens leaders to drastic, not measured, approaches,” Mr. Adelman said. “That’s the only way to make a difference in the world.”
I came across this article from April 11, 2003 on the New York Times website yesterday. At the time, it no doubt seemed like an “I told you so” from a committed Bush Administration hawk bragging on the evident success of the war in Iraq.
Yeah…that was then, eh? Ten years later, almost 5,000 American lives and upwards of 100,000 Iraqi lives down the road, and the article reads more like chutzpah, the fevered ramblings of a True Believer who couldn’t be bothered to take the long view. Ten years down the road, an objective observer understands that we were lied to from the start. There were never any WMDs. Iraq was never about terrorism. It was about the Bush Administration’ abject and irrational hatred of Saddam Hussein. It was about a collective desire, fueled by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, to remove Saddam from power no matter what the cost in other people’s sons and daughters.
The sad thing about this dark chapter in our history is that we’ve evidently learned nothing, because no one is being held accountable for the lies, the propaganda, and the genocide in Iraq. Bush, Cheney, Adelman, and so many others should be in the Hague being tried as war criminals. Instead, they walk the Earth as free men while 5,000 Americans were sacrificed in the services of their lies and manipulation. That doesn’t even take into consideration the thousands more who were maimed and scarred by their service in Iraq.
In their desire to “look forward,” President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have made themselves complicit in war crimes committed by the Bush Administration. It’s a travesty that belies a complete lack of moral courage.
Justice denied is…a horrible thing that proves what a very wise man once told me. Get busted with an ounce of marijuana, he said, and be prepare to do some hard time. If you want to avoid accountability altogether, the key is to do it up so big that no one in government will have the stomach or the moral courage to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. They’ll just wait for it all to go away.
So, there you have it: waste 5,000 American and upwards of 100,000 Iraqi lives…and you become a hot commodity able to command top dollar on the lecture circuit.
