A burglar breaks into a retired couples house and steals
their money and kills them. Who's fault was it? Was it
society's fault for not providing a nouri****ng environment
during the burglar's young, formative years? Was it the
retired couples fault? Why didn't they lock their door? Why
didn't they keep the fact secret that they had relatively
large amounts of cash in their house? Why weren't they
armed? Was it the police department's fault for not
providing better security for citizens?
The following is an interesting article in response to Scott
McClellan's book in which the author asks, "who can honestly
believe that any of the manipulators named in any of these
memoirs, whether they are marketed as exposes or defenses,
could have fooled any Congress or any populace that was not
willing to be fooled." Or, in other words, the author wants
us to believe McClellan's book has little if any value since
the real fault lies with the people and the congress who
were fooled. As I said, the article is interesting. I didn't
say it was necessarily convincing:
"Dan Carpenter
June 8, 2008
The truth about Iraq, Scott-free
Punch up amazon.com and there it is, at the top of the Top
100: Scott McClellan's book of revelations about the Bush
White House he served with heartfelt loyalty before he was
an author and lo! no longer blind.
That's right, shoppers. List price $27.95, your price
$15.37, for the latest log to be thrown on the flickering
coals of national debate over the Iraq colonization.
A pretty resistible deal, it seems to me. I still haven't
gotten to Colin Powell's book, or George Tenet's, or Douglas
Feith's. I'll check the waiting list for Rummie's and
Condi's; but really, I'm having a hard time seeing the
point.
Unless you're a topic-starved Wa****ngton columnist or a
guest-booker for a talk show (in which cases you'd get a
free copy), just what value do these hopelessly biased
amateur blockbusters have?
The press secretary was lied to? Or sort of lied to? He fell
into a pattern of deception, or jumped into one? He could
have saved us from disaster had the scales fallen from his
eyes sooner, or not?
Who cares? Who cares, because who can honestly believe that
any of the manipulators named in any of these memoirs,
whether they are marketed as exposes or defenses, could have
fooled any Congress or any populace that was not willing to
be fooled.
A rank-and-file reader of mine put it as succinctly as the
loftiest of celebrity commentators ever could.
"Why the hullabaloo over McClellan's book?" Ellen Gale
wrote. "There's nothing surprising in it. The president
lied, the president spied, the president nursed a war as if
it were a favorite pet, and he wanted the media to re****t
minimal casualties and maximum gains. The reason why we
rally around McClellan's assertions is the cover they offer
us. Why were we were silent back in 2002, silent in the face
of a brewing war that we knew was flawed from the start?"
Six years, tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of
billions of dollars later, as politicians quarrel over how
many years it might take to extricate ourselves from a
murderous mess that has battered our image in the world,
let's review some data we did not need McClellan or Feith or
Joseph Wilson to provide:
» Iraq never has attacked us, not on Sept. 11, 2001 or any
other time.
» What there was of Saddam Hussein's military was destroyed
in short order in 1991, and any subsequent "re-arming" was
under our surveillance.
» That surveillance plus international inspections turned up
no capability to wreak mass destruction on another nation,
even if one accepted the puny, discredited "evidence" such
as the Niger uranium and Powell's fuzzy photos.
» Wreaking our own mass destruction upon another nation in
order to rearrange its government was unlikely to win us a
Munchkin City welcome even if we are the good invaders of
the West.
Harry Belafonte was right. Colin could have said what we
already knew while he was still there. Heck, he wouldn't
have had to pass up his log on the fire; and he might have
pre-empted other mass destruction of America's forests."
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080608/OPINION05/806080348/1039/OPINION05
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