“This isn’t about Saddam: it’s about us.”
(NOTE: NYT site requires free registration. I rarely link to them because of this. But this Paul Krugman column is worth it.)
Does anyone else get the feeling that people are beginning to care, just a little bit, whether this administration tells the truth? Or is it just wishful thinking on my part?
Guess where lots of people refuse to register.
Read the article without registering: http://truthout.org/docs_03/060403F.shtml
I think you’ll find that the lies the Bush administration told to get us into Iraq will change few minds re: the justness/unjustness of the war. People who wanted this war will shrug at the lies, and people who didn’t want this war will be summarily unsurprised that it was all smoke and mirrors after all.
This war wasn’t just waged with lies. It was waged with oil, with misdirected anger, and with a simmering anti-Arab, anti-Islamic sentiment in the U.S. that’s been waiting for a big, bloody outlet since the Iran hostage crisis of the 70s. Listen to morning radio on your local country station, and the parody songs the DJs chuckle over demonstrate the hickish misconceptions that the entire Middle East is a homogenous third-world sewer of illiteracy and fundamentalism. They don’t even know the difference between Afghanistan and Palestine. Moreover, they don’t want to. They just want a punching bag to salve the injured national manhood they’re tapping into.
Where these revelations will have a significant impact is in the court of global opinion. People around the world, teetering on the brink of writing the U.S. off as a colonial Great Britain Part II with Soviet-style military might, will be pushed over the brink, and the illusion painted by the media that it isn’t safe for Americans abroad will become very real.
If we aren’t careful, we’ll learn what trade embargoes feel like on the other side.
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