An Editorial

A decade after George W. Bush's henchmen concocted a witless scheme to distract the nation from September 11 by starting a splendid little war against someone they thought could be easily beaten, the President who inherited the debacle told the country that the Iraq War was over, a month after the last American was killed in action (No. 4,474).

But for the wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters whose lives have been destroyed by the death of a cherished family member, the War will never be over. For the thousands of Americans who came back crippled in body and mind, the Iraq War will not end until they sleep with their fallen compatriots.

As for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and wounded, and the millions more who fled their homes in fear of their lives, the Iraq War goes on without end for them too.

But for the evil non-geniuses who fomented this war with flagrant lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed danger to American life and limb, for the weak, clueless ex-President now immured in his Dallas mansion, and for the millions who touted or otherwise supported this appalling waste of life and treasure both before sufficient reliable evidence of an Iraqi threat had been presented and long after it was clear that the affray was a sordid misadventure planned and executed with an incompetence not seen in American public life, at least until Hurricane Katrina, the War has long since been erased and overwritten while those who pimped it so shamelessly have moved on to new and equally suspect causes.

They leave behind, in addition to the newly-populated cemeteries and VA clinics, a shattered, ungovernable country whose violent internal fissures are sure to represent a greater long-term threat to American interests than Saddam Hussein, effectively fettered by UN sanctions, ever did.

Were that not sufficient, they also leave a more plausible American adversary – Iran – newly empowered by the power vacuum next door and able to exercise significant influence if not domination over the Shiite Iraqi regime and powerful mullah-led militias, not to mention whatever's going on along their Eastern border. What will Iran do with its new prominence? That's what Don Rumsfeld, who started walking out of Iraq War meetings in 2004 when it became known even to him that the War he concocted and mismanaged had gone off the rails and down the ravine, would call a Known Unknown.

But it was not just American and Iraqi lives that were squandered in the service of an ideology unbounded by reality.  America's international reputation for decency and respect for human rights was sold for less sustenance than Esau's mess of pottage. That same Bush Administration, as cruel as it was ignorant, desperate to validate its false cries of weapons of mass destruction, let loose a plague of torture and brutality not seen at American hands since the Philippine Insurrection over a century ago.

An al-Qaeda leader tortured by the induction of the sensation of drowning on 183 separate occasions for no reason other than to obtain a false confession of assistance from or to Saddam Hussein.  Hundreds if not thousands of Iraqi foot soldiers beaten, abused, and tormented in Abu Ghraib again in a vain effort to coerce false affirmations of Bush Administration mendacious rationalizations.  American citizens arrested in Detroit but confined in military prisons allegedly beyond the reach of habeas corpus as a result of their "capture" in a "war zone."

The result could have been predicted by a child, if not the former Provost of Stanford University: a rallying cry for anti-American sentiment, some of it violent, from Morocco to the Punjab, and the loss of American influence with allies in Europe and other countries whose support was and remains critical to the ongoing struggle against real terrorists planning real attacks on real Americans.

What might not have been so easily predicted, but what has come to pass, to this nation's ever-lasting shame, is a public lust to impose unconstitutional punishments and unfair drumhead courts-martial on non-Americans, even those apprehended in Dayton, Ohio, Ottumwa, Iowa, or any other place where federal courts and law enforcement agencies remain fully open for the business of dispensing justice to those accused of illegal terrorist activities.

We have no doubt that the first time an American is seized by another country, tortured by waterboarding or otherwise, and haled before an irregular military tribunal, those same narrow-minded neocons who so contemned the few voices speaking up against torture and injustice will be the first to wave the Jenkins' Ear of mistreatment of Ammuricans. As they keep telling us, America is the exception, apparently for all purposes.

Unlike most of the American media, with the honorable exception of the Knight-Ridder, now McClatchy, News Service, we were never bamboozled by the vaguely-sourced stories of mobile death rays that Saddam was about to mount on trucks and deliver to bin Laden. Unlike the American media, we have not forgotten, nor do we intend to forget, who concocted this wholly necessary war and and brought pain and heartbreak to millions.

If there is to be a victory in Iraq, it can only come when the malefactors who created the War and its nonexistent rationale have been called to account, not before a court of law (although in the case of real live war criminals like Donald Rumsfeld, that would certainly be appropriate), but in the decision of every sentient American to banish the unrepentant forever from the universe of civilized discourse. W., Rummy, Condi, Cheney, Rudi, Billy, Scooter, Dougie, Judy, Tommy, Freddie, and, yes, Wilfred and Newt: this means you. 

We forgot the lessons of Vietnam, bought so dear and dropped down the memory hole by unrelenting neoconservative revisionism and good old American acedia, only to learn them again in Iraq. Santayana was wrong: it is not that that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. The bill is paid not by the generation that forgot, but by the sacrifice of their children, who never knew.

– The Editors