Either our minds have softened in the United States, or our hearts have hardened way beyond the callous stage. Or, likely both!
Just 13 years past his criminal decision to invade Iraq, George W. Bush is campaigning in South Carolina to get his younger brother, Jeb, in the White House. A fitting payback by an illegitimate and unworthy former president to return Jeb’s intercession as Florida’s governor in America’s mishandling, comical if it hadn’t been for the eventual very tragic consequences, of the 2000 presidential election. It might be worthwhile to remember that it was the US Supreme Court that basically decided to put George Bush, and not Al Gore, in the White House in a 5-4 decision eloquently, but incorrectly, authored by the just-deceased and widely admired justice, Antonin Scalia.
Time and time again we, Americans, keep referring to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a mistake; almost in unanimity: Democrats and Republicans. But it was not a mistake, not by a long shot! It was a calculated, belligerent act by a government clique of elitist war-hawks, Bush-Junior and Dick Cheney at the top of the criminal heap. Fortunately for these American leaders, and unfortunately for the rest of us, only leaders from nations vanquished are indicted and go to trial. If the Axis had prevailed in World War II, and we were living in Hitler’s Millennium, there would not have been those Nuremberg Trials (1945-9), or the subsequent enactment of important, critical international law, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), or the Geneva Convention (1949). No, no gallows for Bush and Cheney… only admiration from fools!
We, as a nation, need to stop calling Bush’s Iraq-deed a mistake, and stop minimizing the holocaustic repercussions of such idiotic, ill-conceived criminal behavior. We should visit and revisit the consequences, if for no other reason than to learn or relearn; and keep George Santayana’s dictum alive: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And Bush’s decision was no venial sin, not just “a mistake”… and its disruptive consequences have proven to be grave and lasting.
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