Seeing Right Through the Plastic War

Okay, everyone agrees, Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. The administration says they got bad info. The other side says the administration cherry picked the intelligence they needed to sell the war to the American people. Somebody is right and somebody is wrong. Bottom line is that the result was a war and people died.

This looks like a plastic war. From the “rescue” of Jessica Lynch from a hospital, to the Mission Accomplished banner and flight suit fictional production, to the plastic Thanksgiving turkey, it was all lathered up to make it bigger than big. They found the leader of the country we invaded in a hole in the ground. They killed his sons and mutilated them so badly that they had to rebuild their faces with wax. They cut into one of the dead man’s legs to show he had the insert there that had been medically implanted sometime earlier before his death. They did all this to show that they were real and they were dead.

There were so many incidents staged and exaggerated. Why did they go to the trouble to do all these things? Why wasn’t reality enough? If your mission is sound and true, why go through so many gyrations to try to be convincing? Why was so much attention given to deception? Why tell lies and create false sensations when you have nothing to hide?

If this war was initiated on the real belief that it was justified due to the possible threat of Saddam causing harm to our country, why would they try so hard and go to such extremes to produce these events? Could it have been because they knew they were working under a veil of lies? Did they feel so shaky about their cause that they felt they needed these creations to hide the truth?

Now as we look back, there was more fiction than fact. Seems the only thing real about this war is that it has resulted in thousands of deaths. Seems any administration that went to war due to what they believed to be good intelligence would be outraged to find they were mistaken. Where is the outrage? Where is the remorse? Where is the strength to admit the errors?

The only reaction we see from the administration is a change of reasons for the war and a determination not to do anything different than what they have been doing. We only see anger at those who dare to question them. Some Democrats who voted to give the president the power to go to war are angry, as well they should be. It’s only natural to be angry when you find you were misled. If the intelligence agencies gave the president bad information, why isn’t he angry? Is he ashamed? Is he remorseful? Does he really care?

So it looks as though we’ll continue to plow along into the future. More caskets will arrive under the cover of American flags. More homes in Iraq will be bombed and more innocent Iraqis will bleed and die. More bombs will explode by the roadside and more bombs will fall from the sky. More people will be imprisoned and likely more people will be tortured. More American kids will be baited into this war with the lure of money and promises that were never intended to be kept. More Americans will go through their lives with artificial limbs and the physical and mental scars of war. The money will continue to freefall from our pocketbooks into the bottomless pit of war. Nothing seems to change.

The saddest fact of all is that the administration, even hiding behind the claim of bad intelligence collected by our intelligence agencies, shows no remorse for what they have caused. If indeed they did rely on information that has now turned out to be false, we have a difficult time believing them, because they have given us so many reasons not to believe them in the past. We have seen so many of their productions that we have no faith in what they say or do. Their excuses without remorse lead us to believe this is just one more of their plastic productions and we see right through it.