Dumb Wars, Now and Forever

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/48681/dumb-wars-now-and-forever

Dumb Wars, Now and Forever
by Robert Scheer | March 21, 2013 - 8:25am

It is a staple of our widely trumpeted Judeo-Christian heritage that the acknowledgment of sin is a prelude to redemption. So how is it that there is no palpable sense of soul searching associated with the 10th anniversary of a war based on officially concocted lies and a policy of torture? It is because the presumption of a unique American claim to an original and enduring innocence perseveres, no matter the death and destruction.

Indeed, some of our most celebrated publicists defined moral deceit as virtue in justifying the Iraq War. “As far as I am concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in April 2003, when U.N. inspectors had clearly established that the proclaimed basis for invading Iraq was a lie. “Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue).”

The big lie, that bane of human existence when embraced by obvious dictators elsewhere, is perceived as merely hyping when employed by an American president. Lyndon Johnson hyped the nonexistent second Gulf of Tonkin attack on American ships to justify the U.S. war in Vietnam, and George W. Bush hyped the fraudulent WMD issue when his fabrication of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attack was proven factually absurd.

Even though Iraq never threatened the security of life in the United States, the Bush administration launched a genocidal civil war replete with a systemic policy of torture directed by U.S. officials at the highest level.