Five plus years ago I received a nice letter from the White House informing me that the President appreciated my letters asking him not to go to war, but that he (the president) knew better and that we had committed our forces to battle with Saddam and eventually kill innocent civilians and destroy the country of Iraq. I wish I’d have been wrong. I wish there weren’t 4100 dead American soldiers who died in vain. I wish there weren’t another thirty thousand or so gravely wounded and I really wish there were no Iraqis dead as a result of American aggression.
A long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report made public Thursday concludes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made public statements to promote an invasion of Iraq that they knew at the time were not supported by available intelligence.–Read more here from the McClatchy News Service.
We were all suspicious, and now it turns out that they were making it up, at least partially. So hopefully the press will ask the question it all begs: if the invasion wasn’t supported by actionable intelligence, why were these men so eager to go to war? What were their real reasons? That’s the line of questioning I hope emerges; it is the one that will expose them.
Then, as a country we have to ask ourselves what we should do to try to make it up to Iraq, their neighbors, and the international community. It would be great to ask them.