a weblog by Paul Fidalgo
This feels like an academic debate. But it isn’t. I have blood on my hands. However many times I try to wash them, the blood will not come off.
Andrew Sullivan, on the explanations and mea culpas given by those like himself who supported the Iraq War.
Warning: Image that accompanies the above link is pretty freaking awful.
That’s quite a shocking picture on his article – you might want to warn your readers. It’s… appropriate considering the content but also more gruesome than one normally stumbles into on the internet without warning.
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Yeah, good call. Normally I don’t bother with that, but yeah, in this case…
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I fucking paid for that.I want to go to that man and put my head to his feet and apologize.
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Actually, I’ve seen far, far worse. Look up the website “Canadian Mind Products” run by Roedy Green, a Canadian atheist, gay man and computer programmer in (I think) that order.
I won’t include a link because the pictures are extremely unsettling, and make the one included in this blogpost look innocuous by comparison. If you want to see it, you’ll have to look it up yourself. It includes pictures of people injured by bombs, shootings, white phosporus and other war crimes, and that’s just the Iraqis who were killed. The images of Americans includes children of US soldiers malformed by depleted uranium and by “medicines” tested on soldiers without side effects being known (think “thalidomide babies” of the 1960s), among other war-related causes.
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Sullivan is still dissembling.
Both critiques apply to me as well. Rumsfeld and Cheney were great at projecting confidence, competence and management skills. And we were all still traumatized by 9/11 and grappling with how to respond to it. But we know now they were as terrified as we were, and their fear drove them to abandon restraint or skepticism or competent military and intelligence advice.
Rumsfeld and Cheney weren’t terrified. They saw an opportunity for a ruthless display of American military might and they seized it. They wrung it dry, squeezing out every last possible drop that could be used to shift the balance of power in favor of the executive branch.
Sullivan still can’t face up to the fact that Bush administration’s case for war was preposterous on its face, even in the aftermath of 9/11.
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Agreed. But at least he lays genuine responsibility on himself for the drumbeat.
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I loved him, but I wish I could read Hitchen’s response to this. I wish it were not glib, but I fear it would have been.
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Sullivan may be admitting his error, but the vast majority of “journalists” are trying to rewrite their own histories and attempt damage control on their careers.
Earlier this week, war cheerleader Christiane Amanpour said (paraphrased) with a straight face, “Where were the journalists?” She was trying to claim that nobody was against the illegal wars, that no one correctly predicted it would be a money pit and would make things worse.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/19/amanpour-on-iraq-where-were-the-journalists/
Then again, several/many of the genuine journalists didn’t survive the wars. They were targeted and deliberately murdered by the US military for refusing to be “embedded” (read: voluntarily censored) such as those killed at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.
And Amanpour isn’t the first. I can recall buffoons in the Washington Compost and NY Times as far back as 2007 pretending that “nobody was against the war” in order to excuse their careerism, their kowtowing to those in power in order to still have “access”.
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Sullivan is not admitting to his error. He’s admitting to a different error completely. Hamilton Jacobi has it exactly right. And if the war had been successful, instead of being the totyal clusterfuck that it was, the USA would now have access to huge amounts of petroleum products and would have huge military bases from which to threaten Iran. Probably we would already be at war with Iran….If Sullivan couldn’t see at the time that the casus belli promoted by Bush, Cheney and their neocons was totally bogus then his claims to be a journalist are risible. So he’s either confessing to being a shameless political whore or a total incompetent. Take your pick!
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Near-Earth Object 
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