When Truth is the Casualty

The Moral Rot of Imperialism

By ROBERT FANTINA

That most useless of all organizations, the U.S. Congress, finally released a report stating that President George Bush built the case for war through exaggerations, shading the truth and ignoring any intelligence he didn’t like. If this comes as a surprise to anyone it can only be a result of their being comatose for the last five years, and only awakening today and reading the report.

The hapless Senate couldn’t even get this information out before Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush’s former press secretary, wrote a book basically saying the same thing. It took a Senate ‘study’ to confirm facts that the world has known now for years: Mr. Bush knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction; no link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks in the United States, and no threat from Iraq to the United States. The Senate report omits pointing out one fact that he did not: Iraq is an oil-rich nation.

How, one wonders, will Congress react? This is the Democratic-Party controlled Congress, the one that was elected in 2006 with a mandate to end the war. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has stated that impeachment is, in her words, off the table, and at this point in Mr. Bush’s reign of terror that is probably a reasonable decision. However, it is only timing now that makes it so; such was not the case when she first came to power.

So what could the reaction be? The U.S. Senate has determined that the President of the United States used lies, scare tactics and chicanery to start a completely unnecessary war (what exactly constitutes a ‘necessary’ war is the topic for another discussion). The war has caused the deaths of over 4,000 Americans, and an estimated 1,000,000 Iraqi men, women and children; tens of thousands more have been maimed. It has cost billions upon billions of U.S. dollars at the same time that 47,000,000 Americans are without health care, 10% of the U.S. home-owning population is in danger of foreclosure and unemployment continues to increase. As the U.S. economy implodes, the money drain of Iraq continues.

Might there not be some response from Congress besides a few indignant statements? Is there any possibility that, even after Mr. Bush leaves office, some Congressional investigation into his behavior might be initiated? Is the concept of a president committing a crime and then being held accountable for it so foreign to Congress that it cannot fathom fulfilling its Constitutional duties? What about others at the highest levels of government that colluded with Mr. Bush to start the war? Are they to be allowed to retire from public life, write books and live off the proceeds of their crimes?

Continued . . .