03.20.06
The Iraq War, year 4, day 1
Today is the first day of the fourth year of the illegal invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq.
I’m not going to belabor the point with a tirade about the missing weapons of mass destruction, the lack of body armor, the skewed intelligence, the unfounded WWII comparisons by Donald Rumsfeld, and the emerging civil war that looms like an elephant in the middle of the room that the current administration is simply choosing to ignore and/or deny publicly.
Instead, I’d like to reflect for a moment on where I was when the bombs first dropped in Iraq.
Back in 2003, I was still working for MetLife, and spending my lunch break as I did every single day — with a trip to the local shopping mall for lunch at Steak Escape. When the “shock and awe” campaign began, I was sitting in my car in the mall parking lot listening to New Jersey 101.5, which was playing a news feed from one of the major news networks.
The funny thing is that, for as vehemently against the war as I am now, I remember wondering what kind of danger the troops would be in and whether these “chemical and biological” weapons would be used against our soldiers. I don’t think I ever believed that war was the “last resort” for our government, but I trusted that they knew something we didn’t about what was going on over there.
Now, three years later, I’m far more politically engaged, and I keep better track of what’s going on in the world on a daily basis. I know that we were either deliberately misled by our leaders, or they acted on shoddy intelligence. At this point I don’t think that really matters. What does matter is that thousands of people are dead or have been maimed mamed because of a stupid decision, whatever the motivation was.
And someone is eventually going to have to pay for it.
Whether the Democrats regain control of the House and Senate and impeach our bastard President, or God forbid, “the smoking gun comes in the form of a mushroom cloud” created by a terrorist who detonates a suitcase nuke in a major city, or social services are completely eliminated from the government of the future due to budgetary constraints, or whether the consequences of our government’s actions take another less predictable form — karma always prevails.
Destruction begets destruction. We need to ask ourselves, what does the world owe us now?
Tags: anniversary, bush, house, impeachment, iraq, politics, senate, war