See No Evil, Become That Evil: Supporting the War As An Act of Unpatriotic

[liberal N proud]

Published on Thursday, February 16, 2006, by CommonDreams.org
See No Evil, Become That Evil: Supporting the War As An Act of Unpatriotic Cowardice
by David Michael Green

Nowadays, Americans have to actively journey far out of their way to blind themselves to how the country was utterly duped into fighting a completely unnecessary war in Iraq.

Last week, the former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell called the WMD rationale for the invasion “a hoax on the American people."

This week, the top CIA official in charge of intelligence assessments on Iraq reported that the administration “used intelligence not to inform decision making, but to justify a decision already made," and that “it went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”

Add these to the revelations which have already been made by other top officials and those with access to them – Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Bob Graham, Bob Woodward (along with Powell’s chief of staff and CIA spooks, a bunch of radical anti-American lefties if ever there were any). Not to mention certain inconvenient facts on the ground, like the complete absence of WMD in Iraq and a war that’s gone completely off the rails. It’s getting to the point where you have to very badly want to believe whatever the president says in order to do so. It’s getting to the point where you have to actively hide from the evidence in order to keep your faith-based war politics safe from the cognitive dissonance induced by overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, that is precisely what many conservatives are now choosing to do.

And to some extent, I don’t even care. If some forty percent of the American public is crouched in such a state of perpetual fear, I guess they have problems enough without being further burdened by somebody’s extended rants on the existential threat which willful ignorance poses to a democracy.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0216-28.htm



Mod, I know this goes one paragraph past the limit but I felt it was necessary to get the point of the whole article.

[Ladyhawk]

1. Great article! K&R

The willful ignorance of my family so astounds me that I've started dreaming every night about having it out with them. I can't say anything to them in real life, so the issue has emerged in my dreams.