Seeing Iraqi men and women step forward to vote their beliefs - people who would most likely be tortured and killed in decades past for even expressing their opinions - is a touching picture indeed. And the election day violence itself was not horrific - for
A recent newsmagazine cover not only stated that Iraqi democracy had been finally won, but backed up the statement with that infamous picture of George W. Bush with the "Mission Accomplished" banner so shamelessly unfurled behind him on the Navy carrier.
So, if you are one who predicted that
Unlike some famous, but unnamable, political figures who could not seem to decide whether they voted for the war or against it, for funding the war or for the war without funding it, or just for the Afghan war or for the Afghan war but only if it did or didn't go into Pakistan, yes, I was against it. And despite Sunday's moving elections, I remain against it.
When I spent considerable amounts of time in
Only once was I invited to a home. In this case, the home of a well-known and more or less government-approved writer. We all pretty much sat there for two hours, barely exchanging a sentence, while we wondered who would turn out to be the inevitable informer in our midst.
So for me, after we invaded
First, there were all the lies the American people were fed: Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction to be loosed soon upon the West! The neocon idea that
These lies are as false today as they were yesterday. Saddam, a monster of magnitude, had boasted of such weapons only in order to terrify unfriendly and acquisitive neighbors like
Then there is the sheer cost of
The International Monetary Fund reported recently that at the turn of the 21st century, the
Add to this the degree to which the George W. Bush administration's and the neocons' obsession with going to war in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, deflected them from finding and defeating al-Qaida, the true authors of 9/11. If we fail in
New York Times writer Dexter Filkins reminisced recently in The New Republic about how we essentially threw
"It is useful, if a little sad," he wrote, "to recall just how complete the American-led victory was in the autumn of 2001. By December, the Taliban had vanished from
It is curious in
And so, when something wrong goes somewhat right, like Sunday's elections in
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