the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jul 19, 2004
U.S. officials have had the devil of a time trying to explain why the reasons they gave for going to war against Iraq, why all the stories about weapons of mass destruction and ties with al Qaeda, have proven to be complete and utter lies. In the latest attempt, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that was supposed to be the fruit of a year-long investigation into this very problem. It gained unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
So, how did so many officials, starting with the White House and Congress, get it "wrong," according to the eminent Republicans and Democrats of the U.S. Senate? After 511 pages and 117 separate conclusions, the report finally concludes that the top officials were the victims of–get this–"a culture of group think" and a "dysfunctional intelligence structure" at the CIA that had an "institutional belief" that Iraq possessed illicit weapons.
What a lot of double talk.
Who ever believed Bush’s reasons for war? Certainly not the millions of people in this country who demonstrated against it. Clearly, behind all of Bush’s bluster were the flimsiest of excuses that were constantly and easily being taking apart by a host of experts. There was the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who didn’t stop denouncing what Bush was saying. Even the U.N. weapons inspectors, who usually bend over backward to accommodate the U.S. government, refused to come to the conclusions that Bush wanted. As for the CIA, which winds up being the main culprit in the Senate report, everyone knows how Cheney and Rumsfeld leaned on it to make sure that it spouted the "right" kind of intelligence–which of course it obligingly did–to the delight and joy of the very same Democrats and Republicans who today so publicly wring their hands over "group think" in the CIA.
Certainly, if the Democrats and Republicans followed their own conclusions about how wrong the reasons were for the U.S. to invade Iraq, they would call for an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. and foreign troops from Iraq and the turning over of hundreds of billions of dollars in funds to allow the Iraqi people to rebuild their country and get on with the rest of their lives.
The fact that they don’t, only proves that they are ready to continue to support a war that they admit is a lie, just as they earlier supported the lies that brought the war on.