Well, I'm sitting in my office, grumpy, on what's supposed to be my one day off this week. On television and the internets, we're hearing the grand jury will indict Scooter Libby but not Karl Rove, who will remain under investigation.
It all comes to this. One of Cheney's inner circle is being indicted, but the folks at the top are still just outside the prosecutor's reach.
I cannot exult. I cannot celebrate, and not just because Rove is not on the list for today....
Crossposted at Street Prophets
Yes, I will take some satisfaction in Libby's indictment, and I would take more satisfaction were he to be tried and convicted of illegally revealing Valerie Plame's identity.
Here, way outside the Beltway and indeed outside the country, my mind keeps drifting back to the why.
We have had an independent counsel, and a grand jury, and apparently soon we will have at least one indictment... over the deliberately and vindictively leaked name of a CIA covert operative.
Where do I begin?
This, while the regime in power in my land has:
- illegally invaded another country,
- invented evidence of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify that action, invented links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida that never existed,
- cynically exploited the memory of the thousands who died on September 11,
- criminally awarded billions and billions of dollars of my tax money in no-bid contracts to Cheney's pals at Halliburton
- endorsed and practiced torture of prisoners of war
- violated international law and withdrawn our nation from international treaties, including the Vienna Convention Optional Protocol
- silently stood by while New Orleans drowned...
I could go on. And on. And on.
Five years of BushCo, and all we've managed to do is (still only potentially, at this point) indict Scooter Libby for revealing one woman's identity.
I guess it's like Al Capone and tax evasion. You take what you can get.
But still... two-thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are dead.
I live with the grim certainty that my 18-year-old nephew, newly inducted into his home state's National Guard, will be sent to Iraq, and could become one of the next two thousand dead service members.
Thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead, including several people I was proud to call my friends.
People. They are all people to me, they are not statistics, not numbers, not abstracts. Valerie Plame is an abstract.
Back in the `80s, when the Reagan administration was doing its ugliness in Central America, there was a song by the band X called I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, and the lyrics keep running through my head:
I'm guilty of murder of innocent men,
innocent women, innocent children, thousands of them.
My planes, my guns, my money, my soldiers.
My blood on my hands. It's all my fault.
I must not think bad thoughts....
But I can't help it. I can't help any of it.
As I write this, I am listening to the president, my president, live on television. He is invoking yet again the memories of our dead, invoking the threat of extremism, trying to stir our patriotism to fight his war. Wars. And, one assumes, trying to distract us from the leak and the prosecutor and the indictment.
He said, and this is a paraphrase, something like we will not accept anything less than total victory.
This chills me to the bone. What will we lose in that neverending battle? He takes a few names - Zarqawi, Zawahiri, bin Laden - to try to put a face on a foe that can never be defeated by any army, and one that gets stronger the more we seek a military victory, because he either fails to understand why they fight us, or willfully refuses to admit it. Because fear is his political currency, and he is short of political capital now. He needs more fear, more fear, more fear.
I live in a largely Muslim country. Most people here would agree with Bush on one score -- that Islamic extremists who behead people and set off car bombs in marketplaces have no place in their religion. But that is usually where it ends.
I met one of the Kifaya leaders last month, and he made a point of telling me - as so many people here have - that he does not hate America, although he had been vocally critical of American policy on Iraq.
I hear this a lot: I don't hate America, I don't hate Americans. It saddens me, every time. It should never be necessary to say such a thing. And I should never need to say, in return, And I do not hate Muslims, I do not hate Arabs, please know that not all Americans agree with our government.
And yet I feel the need to say these things, as they do. This is our dialogue of fear, the fear of being misunderstood, the fear of being mistaken for what we are not.
My new acquaintance said his movement would welcome an American commitment to real democracy in the Middle East, but few people believe that is what Mr. Bush desires. Democracy, he told me, does not come through invasions and occupations.
No. It does not.
And now the president's speech is over, the talking heads are back on my TV screen talking about the prosecutor and the leak. The diversionary tactic has not worked. Nobody is talking about foreign policy, or the war on terror, or its lasting (and they will be lasting) implications for our nation and our world.
And I wonder whether the diversionary tactic perhaps should have worked, because in the end, these are the things we must not lose sight of, amidst the The Leak and The Scandal and The Indictment:
My planes, my guns, my money, my soldiers, my blood on my hands.
(note from tsp -- I just tidied up the formatting a bit, and edited the list of regime crimes to include a few things I shouldn't have left out... can't keep doing that, though, as the list would be too long...)