Interesting Stuff

the Bush administration is (again) apparently a bunch of bald-faced liars. As I hope you have heard by now, the Downing Street Memo was published in the London Times roughly a month ago. It explicitly states that the Bush administration had been planning on invading Iraq at least 8 months before it started, regardless of what the public wanted, and regardless of what the facts stated. They even went so far as to doctor the “facts” to fit their goals. To quote the actual document, “military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” Tony Blair and the Brittish Labor Party has admitted that the memo is, in fact, real, and this is actually what happened. Some people in Washington are saying the same thing. However, the Bush administration failed to comment about the memo for over a month, even though it has been about a month since a congressional request to explain it. Naturally, they denied the claims that intelligence was being fabricated and that war was inevitable. However, more memos are beginning to surface.

The thing that confuses me, however, is the part where the Brittish deliberately tried to get UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq, specifically for the purpose of trying to justify this “inevitable” war (if the inspectors were not let in, it would appear that Iraq had something to hide). Why did the Brittish do this? Why not simply say to the US, “you cannot just invade a country on fabricated evidence. We will not cover your asses,” and told the public about it. This would have given Tony Blair a huge popularity boost, saved thousands of lives, and shown the US that even if it is the only superpower at the moment, it cannot go around invading countries at will. Instead, the Labor Party took a huge dive at the polls (this memo surfaced a short time before the British elections, and although Blair still won, it was by a mere 60% instead of his two previous 90% victories), people would not still be dying in Iraq, and the US has gotten the message that no one will stand in its way, and it can do anything it wants. If anyone has any insight into why the British went along with this, I’d like to hear it.

Mind you, we probably won’t invade any more countries soon, since the army failed to meet recruiting goals for the fourth month in a row, and didn’t even get close to making its reduced back-up goal for the month. Although things like the Stop-Loss Act will help in the short run, it has cut another bite out of recruiting, since people justifiably don’t want to be forced to go back into service. Ironically, I think that now that our armed forces, reserves, and national guard are stretched thinly across Afghanistan and Iraq, now that we are not getting enough recruits to man our forces, now that we have made enemies with most of the world and almost all of the Muslim world, and now that the war has been shown to actually be justified with intentionally falsified claims, we are more susceptible to an attack than before the war in Iraq started.