Let Them Eat Yellowcake

Okay, once in a while there's a good reason (other than gathering fodder for new rants) for me to scan the news. For one thing, I've been missing out on all this fun:

CIA didn't get disputed documents until February 2003 after Bush claim: Those would be the forged papers "proving" that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons and that we must bomb the crap out of Iraq now before he gets away with it. Or, as Dubya put it in his State of the Union address, "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes." Even if, as it turns out, the "proof" we have is bogus.

We knew the f***ers were lying about Iraq having and building more "weapons of mass destruction," but to actually know that the documents "proving" such were forged (by whom???), and that the White House pushed to include such obviously dubious knowledge in Dubya's State of the Union address despite CIA assertions that its investigations couldn't confirm the information... Be still, my heart. Dare I be naively idealistic enough to believe this might lead to something... serious?

I do find it (almost) amusing that some of the democrats now blasting away at Dubya marched right along with the war machine last winter. I remember falling silent in shock as one democratic senator after another voted to send our soldiers to war and to shower bombs on the Iraqi people, not challenging or even raising the faintest question about whether it was truly justified or not.

See, the stakes are far more than political. As Arianna Huffington wrote today, "more than 200 American soldiers have been killed and a thousand more wounded to rid the world of an imminent threat that wasn't. To say nothing of the countless Iraqis who have lost their lives. And those numbers will only rise as we find ourselves stuck in a situation Gen. Tommy Franks predicts will continue for at least another four years." Our next-door neighbors have a son stationed "somewhere over there, probably in Baghdad but he can't tell us because of security concerns" and all I can think is that if he gets killed, these good people will have lost their only child -- who signed up to serve because he believes in his country -- for what? Lies and manipulation, and the greed that is always right there fueling them.