News item:
U.S. Toll in Iraq Pushes Past 1,700
Let's take the Wayback Machine for a Sunday night joyride. I'm the first person to complain that in the leadup to war with Iraq in January and February 2003, the corporate media was falling all over themselves jockeying for position and coveted embedded slots atop the first U.S. Army Humvees crossing the Tigris River into Baghdad.
It's probably just as important to remember that there were some "lone wolves" out there; corporate media writers who actually had the cajones and foresight to see that BushCo was selling us (and the world) a bill of damaged goods.
Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle was one of them...
Here's a
snippet of Morford's column from 1/10/2003, written as the BushCo Orchestra was banging the drums of war in a rising crescendo of deluded fantasy:
...Let us be clear. Saddam is not a threat to the U.S., and never has been. He is merely yet another cowardly and murderous thug, much like the countless other despots and autocrats, from Marcos to King Fahd to Ariel Sharon, the U.S. has added to its payroll when it served our needs, and whom we then backhand when we need economic stimulus, or when the president needs a boost to his approval ratings, or when the corporate pals of the Bush WASP mafia need more billion-dollar petrochemical and defense contracts. Aha. Perhaps this is why.
We are, in short, going to attack and massacre Iraq for the oil reserves, to protect America's corporate interests, to feed the gaping maw of the military-industrial complex. Same as it ever was.
But let us be perfectly clear: We are most definitely not cranking up the appalling war machine for your sake, or for the country's protection, or for our commendable standing among our humanitarian allies.
We are not doing it to defeat terrorism (it will have the exact opposite effect), or to make the streets safer for our children, or because they've found big scary WMDs (they haven't -- not a one) -- or even for Iraq's own good. And to believe we are is, quite simply, to be wholly misinformed and openly, flagrantly, deliberately deceived.
Do we understand this? We must, we absolutely must, try and understand this...
But we didn't. As the daily cacaphony rose from the Bush administration, not only had the Bush administration managed to convince a vast majority of Americans that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he could unleash on U.S. shores in mere minutes (a fantasy for which there was
never any reality, much less actual evidence), but they had convinced a clear majority of Americans that Saddam was complicit in the events of 9/11.
For fuck's sake, Cheney even held onto that particular fantasy through the election last year.
Mark Morford must have had a crystal ball on his desk in January, 2003. Too bad that not too many people bothered to listen to him.
Cross posted at All Spin Zone