I was gratified to hear Secretary of Soothing Doublespeak Colin
Powell the other day; his words assured me that the Administration
policy on Iraq is on a consistent track, albeit a track which
begins at King’s Cross Station, Platform 9-3/4 and ends at
Hogwarts.
I was gratified to hear Secretary of Soothing Doublespeak Colin Powell the other day; his words assured me that the Administration policy on Iraq is on a consistent track, albeit a track which begins at King’s Cross Station, Platform 9-3/4 and ends at Hogwarts. In fact, Administration spokespeople are being forced to dispense more and more fresh hogwarts every day to cover the hogwarts they dispensed the day before.
“The people were not told lie after lie after lie,” he said, lying. “The people were told that Iraq was a dangerous situation.” Now, my memory may not be what it used to be, but I recall language considerably stronger than “a dangerous situation” being tossed around when we and Congress and the world were being sold Operation Fix Daddy’s Mistake. Now, South-Central L.A. is a dangerous situation. The sorry state of America’s highways and bridges is a dangerous situation. The contents of most people’s garage is a dangerous situation. But Iraq? No, I do believe that back last fall and winter the message the Bushies were pumping out was not really “dangerous situation”; it was more along the lines of WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!! OH GOD, THEY HAVE NUKES!! AND ANTHRAX!! AND MISSILES!! AND, AND, AND OTHER STUFF THAT’S REALLY BAD THAT WE HAVEN’T EVEN FIGURED OUT WHAT IT IS YET!! AND THEY’VE GOT BOATLOADS OF ALL OF IT, IT’S JUST LYING AROUND ALL OVER THE COUNTRY PILED SO HIGH THAT PEOPLE CAN’T GET TO THE GROCERY STORE WITHOUT RUNNING INTO IT!! AND HE’S GONNA USE IT ON US ANY MINUTE, GOSH, I JUST HOPE WE GET THERE IN TIME!! It was more like that.
But even if we all decide to sell our brains for scrap and buy into the idea that “a dangerous situation” is what we were told, without the famous and endlessly-touted WMD, of which five months, thousands of dedicated searchers, and hundreds of millions of dollars has produced a grand total of exactly none, what was the dangerous situation? Ah, thank heavens, we have National Security Advisor and indefatigable Warrior Princess Condoleezza Rice to cleverly gloss over the tragic absence of enemy weaponry. “Let there be no mistake,” she declared in a speech last week, “Saddam had an ambition to threaten.” See, it all makes sense. It turns out there’s a small corollary to the Bush Doctrine of “we don’t have to wait for an attack, we can go to war on the strength of a threat.” The corollary is, “we don’t have to wait for an actual threat, we can go to war on the strength of the threat of a threat based on a wish.” In other words, we started a war, sent 170,000 troops halfway around the world, killed thousands, took hundreds of casualties, convinced most of the world that our chief executive is a reckless irresponsible moron, and are now in the process of draining the national treasury to create a country which it turns out our 12-year embargo had previous destroyed, because we knew Saddam WOULD LIKE to threaten us even if he didn’t have the means to do so.
Perhaps we should simplify the Bush Doctrine so everybody understands it. It is our policy to attack and kill everybody who doesn’t like us, because it stands to reason that if they don’t like us they must have an ambition to threaten us, and there’s the ball game right there.
When they make the movie about how we were conned into this enormous pile of hogwarts they can call it “The Vast And The Spurious.”
