Same time, next year

That's a wrap for this year's "Day of Shame" blogging, commemorating the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 UN presentation — and the media's outrageous approval for it.

To simplify reading this first year's remembrances and commentary, here are the posts in chronological order:

• An American Tragedy (intro)
• Something is rotten in the state (a Shakespearean tragedy)
• Print the legend (the media meltdown)
• Three little letters (why ask why?)
• The devils want to wear my red shoes (wondering how Powell spends the Day of Shame)
• Dirty deeds done expensively (summing up the war's costs)

Of course, the echoes of what happened that day are with us all year 'round. They continue to define the conduct of the administration and the media.

Perhaps this issue, noted by Gilbert Cranberg, is the most curiously and dangerously under-explored:

The fundamental question: Why did the press as a whole fail to question sufficiently the administration’s case for war?

Do come back y'all for next year's Fabulous Fifth-anniversary Fibtacular.

By then, we may have a whole new set of stories about how hyped and falsified evidence plus media incuriosity says "bring it on" to apocalyptic mayhem.

Peace out, my friends, peace out.

Dirty deeds done expensively

Part of the pre-Iraq War marketing was how cheap and easy it would be.

Rep. Jan Schakowski (D-IL) has a great — if hideously formatted — roundup of GOP claims of a zipless war. (h/t)

Just as the media didn't question whether Iraq actually had WMD, it failed to investigate the rumored stockpiles of chocolates and flowers.

Turns out, not only was there was no yellowcake, there was no cakewalk either.

When all is said and done, the costs of this misadventure are unimaginably high.

Who could have predicted it would be costly to have the media give a free ride to a naïve, incompetent, impulsive, sanctimonious, corrupt, bellicose and altogether juvenile presidential candidate, for half of America to vote for such a person, for the Supreme Court to suppress vote counting, and for Congress to enable every bad idea that person ever had or was fed? Live and learn, I guess.

Estimates put the US's financial cost in the $2 trillion range:

"The highest-grossing movie ever, Titanic, took in $1.8 billion. We spend that in Iraq in one week."

To paraphrase pre-lobotomy Dennis Miller, "Let me put that in perspective. If there were only one guy, he'd have to pay two trillion dollars." Another way to put it in perspective is to grab American Conservative from Miller's nightstand and read "Money for Nothing: Billions of dollars have disappeared, gone to bribe Iraqis and line contractors’ pockets":

When the final page is written on America’s catastrophic imperial venture, one word will dominate the explanation of U.S. failure—corruption....

In one notorious incident in April 2004, $1.5 billion in cash that had just been delivered by three Blackhawk helicopters was handed over to a courier in Erbil, in the Kurdish region, never to be seen again. Afterwards, no one was able to recall the courier’s name or provide a good description of him.

Paul Bremer, meanwhile, had a slush fund in cash of more than $600 million in his office for which there was no paperwork. One U.S. contractor received $2 million in a duffel bag. Three-quarters of a million dollars was stolen from an office safe, and a U.S. official was given $7 million in cash in the waning days of the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] and told to spend it “before the Iraqis take over.” Nearly $5 billion was shipped from New York in the last month of the CPA. Sources suggest that a deliberate attempt was being made to run down the balance and spend the money while the CPA still had authority and before an Iraqi government could be formed.

Where does that money come from?

Raising taxes on America's corporations and wealthiest citizens is off the table, so golly, who's going to pay? It couldn't be people on the middle and lower rungs of the economy and their children and grandchildren, could it? It couldn't come from cutting corners on education, health care, public works, alternative-energy investments, and actual homeland security, could it? It couldn't come from giving short shrift to the veterans we're keeping in Iraq for tour after tour, could it?

The cost to soldiers is heartbreaking. Yes, war is Hell. But unnecessary war is more hellish, still. US deaths have surpassed the 3,100 mark. "Non-mortal casualties" are nearing 50,000. Their personal economic and emotional costs are staggering, as well. And for what?

Estimates of Iraqi deaths are in the hundreds of thousands, and life in today's Mesopotamia is a nightmare of suicide bombs, kidnapping, torture, and vigilante executions. And then there are then hazards of living under occupation.

A quick peek at today's news from Iraq includes:

AZIZIYA - A car bomb in a vegetable market killed 17 people and wounded 27 in the town of Aziziya, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

MOSUL - Police found seven bullet-riddled bodies dumped in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, police and hospital sources said.

GARMA - Police found the bodies of three people with gunshot wounds in the head in the town of Garma, near Falluja, 50km (35 miles) west of Baghdad, police said.

NEAR FALLUJA - A car bomb exploded near a mosque and killed a worshipper and wounded four others on Wednesday in a town near Falluja, police said.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen attacked the convoy of Ammar Tu'uma, a member of the Fadhila Shi'ite political party, and wounded one of his guards near Mansour district in western Baghdad, police and the media office of his party said. He was unharmed.

BAGHDAD - U.S. and Iraqi forces raided the Health Ministry building in central Baghdad and arrested Hakim Zamili, the deputy health minister, a ministry spokesman and witnesses said.

BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed six people and wounded 10 others in the New Baghdad district in eastern Baghdad, police said.

SUWAYRA - Three roadside bombs exploded in quick succession, killing seven people and wounding 23 others on Wednesday in the town of Suwayra, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said on Thursday.

BAQUBA - Gunmen attacked a rapid reaction police unit and killed four policemen and a civilian in the religiously mixed city of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

Oh, and:

A U.S. airstrike Thursday killed 13 insurgents in a volatile area west of Baghdad, the military said. Local officials said 45 civilians, including women and children, died in the attack.

Just another day in paradise.

Do you care, Colin Powell? Do you care, Judith Miller? Do you care, chickenhawks?

Are you proud of the numerous long-term costs of waging a withering, ill-conceived, and unnecessary war? Are you proud of the damage wrought by prisoner abuse and curtailment of domestic freedoms from this metastasized "War on Terror"?

• Turned tamed, secular Iraq into a hotbed of religious/ethnic terror
• Diminished our standing as an honest broker for Israel/Palestine problems
• Pushing us to the brink of war with Iran (or at least helping provide excuses to re-try the Bush Doctrine in a neighboring and much more formidable country)
  
• Potentially triggering conflicts throughout the region, which could lead to a true World War and/or consolidation of a militant Caliphate
• Per the National Intelligence Estimate, increasing anti-US terrorist recruitment
  
• Lost opportunity to secure Afghanistan and go after Al-Qaeda
• General loss of moral authority, trustworthiness
• Validating beliefs about Americans as unilateralists — as violent, arrogant, ignorant cowboys
• Giving democracy a black eye
• Squandering all post-9/11 international goodwill — and then some
• Loss of motivation for other countries to help us with intelligence and future conflicts
  
• Giving allies and enemies the (correct) impression that we're uninterested in diplomacy
• Giving enemies the (correct) impression that we practice pre-emptive war; may lead them to heavily arm and to strike first and hard
• Giving enemies the (correct) impression that we practice torture and extraordinary renditions; may encourage them to ignore Geneva Convention protection for American POWs
  
• Diminishing our reputation for both strength and intelligence – may embolden enemies
• Loss of trust in our government and our national integrity
• Loss of a credible media
  
• Created bitter divisions at home
• Straining our military capacity
• Straining our National Guard capacity
• Making military recruitment harder
• Loss of civil liberties (in broader so-called war on terror)

So, tell me, was removing Saddam Hussein worth all of that? Were those phantom WMDs worth all of that?

If your answer is yes, please say "hi" to Mrs. Cheney.

The devils want to wear my red shoes

I wonder how Colin Powell marked the Monday holiday.

Maybe he spent it at the Colin Powell Center For Policy Studies, whose focus includes (I shit you not):

... the histories and best practice of international organizations such as the United Nations, with particular emphasis on issues of conflict and security.

Perhaps the tragic figure Powell cuts these days is not so Shakespearean after all. This soul-searching mission sounds more like David Duchovny as Jake, in "Red Shoe Diaries."

Citizens, do you keep PowerPoints?
Have you been betrayed?
Have you betrayed another?
Man, 69, wounded and alone,
recovering from the loss of a
once in a lifetime country,
looking for reasons why.
Willing to pay top $$$
For your experiences
Please send transcripts to:

Red State Politics
P. O. Box 2003
New York, NY 10017

All submissions strictly classified, or at least highly redacted

Three little letters

Never underestimate the power of asking why.

It nearly saved the moon (video above), and in "The Prisoner" (spoiler alert!) merely typing it destroyed a pernicious computer.

The "why?" behind attacking Iraq is perhaps most accurately answered: "no damn good reason." Should that not suffice, there's always:

• Texas tea
• Oedipus
• Moses and Jesus
• and Leo Strauss
  

That's all well and good (not really, but c'est la guerre de caprice).

But why, we ought to wonder, did the entire media establishment declare a sociopathic fool's errand to be an iron-clad necessity? Why did the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post and every leading news magazine and television network — supposed bastions (News Corp. notwithstanding) of rigorous and even left-leaning reportage — become as trustworthy as a Nigerian investment e-mail?

There are many plausible reasons, perhaps all of which are largely true (and many of which are discussed in Eric Boehlert's Lapdogs, excerpted here):

• Corporate consolidation: despite the ever-popular "liberal media" meme, major media outlets belong to large corporations — the GOP's most generously favored constituency
• Jealousy of the ascendant Fox News and rightwing radio, and avarice for the profit potential of that then-growing market segment
  
• Abandoning the "Fairness Doctrine" had come home to roost: deregulation squelched the tradition of seeking out responsible conflicting opinions
• Conservatives had a better machine for developing and promoting noisy, colorful pundits (e.g., by subsidized bulk-buying of books, establishing rightwing bloviators as best-selling authors). Throughout the Bush II era, conservatives have, for example, wildly outnumbered progressives on news panels.
  
• News culture has been debased into "infotainment": even where supposed "debate" occurs, it's little more than a diversionary spectacle
  
• War sells: it's always a great programming idea (dramatic, visually exciting, and a nifty opportunity to use cool logos and portentous theme music)
  
• Peace doesn't play in Peoria (at least not in 2003): for a wounded nation, punishing random A-rabs was in; wonky ethical debates were out. As Boehlert notes, MSNBC fired progressive Phil Donahue because he "presented 'a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.'"
• As De Tocqueville said: "It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth." For short attention-span media, "Strong President fight war" = good story; "Disempowered progressives question war" = bad story.
• A war story has "legs" and prestige: give me peace and I report for a day; give me war and I become Stone Phillips for a lifetime
• Fear of undermining national security: with the open-ended "War on Terror" still in its early days, media members felt honor-bound to assist in the administration's military agendas
  
• Fear of “liberal bias” accusations: the Right worked the refs so hard, the media became active partners in their Overton Window framing, and became embarrassingly solicitous of winger approval
  
• Fear of personal reprisals: the creeping, nay leaping, McCarthyism of Bush's America made it far safer to be with him than agin' him
• Fear of marginalization: the more the Bush White House played hard-to-get, the more the media played easy-to-get. Better to be an insider and stay in the game than a muckraker who can't get into a press conference. This would reach its zenith (or nadir) in the "embedded" war reporting, as journalists breathlessly described the exploits of "their units."
  
• Beltway culture: Washington journalists and pundits venerate power. With the president "all in" for this new war, it would have been a huge breach of decorum to confront him on his (and Powell's) broad set of claims. Even relatively skeptical reporters in the most heated of press conferences aren't in the habit of calling the president a liar to his face.
  
• Supporting the President's agenda is the most defensible position. If the war proved justified and successful, everything would be fine. If not, the press could just play the old tapes and say they were lied to. Very different from crossing swords with a President whose plan had not (yet) been proven faulty.
• The media had made Bush into a hero for (not preventing) 9/11. Now that he was embarking on a bold, new adventure, it would be unseemly and controversial to switch to a more cynical narrative.
• The power of the Big Lie: like many citizens, media members found it unthinkable that an American President could lie or be incompetent at such a magnitude as conning us into an unnecessary and ill-planned war
  
• Jingoism: the Chris Matthewses enjoy a little Top Gun kickass, just like Joe Sixpack does
• Incompetence: decades of focus on style over substance, noise over signal, and heat over light had thinned the ranks of capable journalists
• Laziness: it's easier to "rip and read" what the White House gives you than to do your own reporting
  
• Saddam Hussein was a cartoon villain: an actual bad guy, and one of them A-rabs. Why make waves and be accused of being un-American to save this guy (plus some other brown-skinned people we either don't care about or must sacrifice everything to liberate, depending on which way the wind was blowing that day)?

If only half of these theories are right, it's a daunting list.

It's well beyond my capacity to imagine how we'll ever get back to a trustworthy media, but on this day in particular, I'm reminded of how badly we need it.

So why ask why? Because if we don't, how will things ever get better?


Update:

In the context of the drumbeat for an Iran conflict, Dan Froomkin proposes a set of guidelines to keep the media from being suckered again:

• You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority
• Provocation Alone Does Not Justify War
• Be Particularly Skeptical of Secrecy
• Watch for Rhetorical Traps
• Don’t Just Give Voice to the Administration Officials
• Look Outside Our Borders
• Understand the Enemy
• Encourage Public Debate
• Write about Motives
• Talk to the Military

Now, why — I hope you'll ask them every chance you get — don't they do this, when so much hangs in the balance?

(h/t)

Print the legend

Not to let anyone off the hook, but it's not exactly surprising that the Bush administration would head us straight into the Big Muddy.

At what point did Bush and Cheney not reek of arrogance, dishonesty, and venality? Ditto for their neocon "brain trust" and a rubber-stamp Congress drunk on pork and power.

Sarah Vowell admits she was caught off-guard:

I see my initial worries about the current administration as the greatest betrayal in my whole life by my old pal pessimism. I attended the president's inauguration in 2001. When he took the presidential oath, I cried. What was I so afraid of? I was weeping because I was terrified that the new president would wreck the economy and muck up my drinking water. Isn't that adorable? I lacked the pessimistic imagination to dread that tens of thousands of human beings would be spied on or maimed or tortured or killed or stranded or drowned, thanks to his incompetence.

Me? I expected the worst from the Bushies, and that's just what I got. "You may screw up my country," I thought, "but nothing you do will surprise me."

Surprise came from another front, and my pessimism-readiness proved just as inadequate as Vowell's. The reviews came in for Colin Powell's off-Broadway production.

If Powell's selling of the war was Shakespearean, the media's response belonged in a Greek tragedy — a unison chorus shouting "compelling, compelling":

"a massive array of evidence," "a detailed and persuasive case," "a powerful case," "a sober, factual case," "an overwhelming case," "a compelling case," "the strong, credible, and persuasive case," "a persuasive, detailed accumulation of information," "the core of his argument was unassailable," "a smoking fusillade... a persuasive case for anyone who is still persuadable," "an accumulation of painstakingly gathered and analyzed evidence," "only the most gullible and wishful thinking souls can now deny that Iraq is harboring and hiding weapons of mass destruction," "the skeptics asked for proof; they now have it," "a much more detailed and convincing argument than any that has previously been told," "an ironclad case... incontrovertible evidence," "succinct and damning evidence... the case is closed," "Colin Powell delivered the goods on Saddam Hussein," "masterful," "If there was any doubt that Hussein... needs to be... stripped of his chemical and biological capabilities, Powell put it to rest."

This just couldn't be. I'd seen the show! Max Bialystock wouldn't have touched this turkey.

Though this site commemorates February 5, 2003, perhaps the true day of shame is the 6th, when the press and pundit class pronounced Powell's speech an unimpeachable call to arms.

I should have seen it coming. The signs all pointed to it.

It was there when a doddering and valueless Ronald Reagan was exalted as "presidential" and "The Great Communicator." It was there when non-stop equivalation turned a mismatch between a well-rounded statesman and a strutting twit into a horserace.

But the entire news establishment calling bullshit parfait? And not just any bullshit, bullshit that was ready, willing, and — thanks to them — able to kill hundreds of thousands of people and catalyze chaos in the most volatile part of the world!?

If the press would do that, what might they do if the government started spying on us, torturing people, and suspending the right of habeas corpus? Let's hope we don't have to find out.

Perhaps like many progressives, you saw the UN presentation for the sad, whorific spectacle it was. Or maybe like many others — including those who entrusted war powers to Bush — you believed either that Bush was bluffing his way to more leverage with Hussein or he had much stronger evidence that he couldn't reveal for security reasons.

If you were blogging in February and March 2003 (I wasn't), or if you still have your old e-mail (I do), look back at what you wrote then. George Santayana would have wanted you to.

Here's what I found in my trip down memory lane, five questions I kept sending a Republican friend while debating the merits of the pending war:

1. In your opinion, what good evidence did Bush or Powell provide that Saddam has WMD?
2. How can one justify a pre-emptive war absent strong evidence of either a clear and present threat or a violation of UN sanctions?
3. If evidence doesn't matter, why did we urge the UN to resume the inspection regimes?
4. What justified our trumping the UN's inspection efforts (which, again, were resumed at our urging), at a substantial cost to us in international good will?
5. Why are we optimistic that regime change will be effective, given the tragic history of blowback and no U.S. good deed going unpunished in the Middle East?

The debate raged on, but he never did answer any of those questions.

I ain't no Bob Woodward. I don't have Judith Miller's Rolodex, nor the bully pulpit that is the New York Times.

They clearly know more about American politics than I ever will. So, why didn't they bother to wonder about such things? And why, to this day, does the MSM still work to tilt power toward this failed administration? Their robotic insistence on "centrism" and "bipartisanship" is, at heart, a call to unmake last November's redistribution of Congressional power:

Back in 2002, when the U.S. was debating whether to invade Iraq, those who opposed the invasion were, for that reason alone, dismissed as unserious morons and demonized as anti-American subversive hippies. Despite the fact that subsequent events have largely proven them to have been right, and that those who did the demonizing were the frivolous, unserious, know-nothing extremists, this narrative persists, so that -- even now, when most Americans have turned against this war -- the only way to avoid being an "extremist," and to be rewarded with the "centrist" mantle, is to support the continuation of this war in one form or another.

If you thought the war was a good idea at the time, remember that you had a lot of help in coming to that conclusion. I hope that makes you even more mad as hell than I am, and even more committed to not taking this anymore.

We should be mad. One of the pillars of our American democracy went completely comatose at the switch as the train hurtled toward an unfinished bridge.

[Well, I should qualify "completely." A handful of people got it right, and we're all indebted to the reporters who put it all on the line to get a little truth out of Iraq. It's a damned shame that, as an institution, speaking truth to power is the exception, not the rule, in today's Fourth Estate.]

This issue is the main reason for this Brigadoon blog (which I plan to reactivate this time each year).

Not to put too fine a point on it: what the fuck is wrong with the American news media, and what is our best hope for fixing it?

And if we can't fix it, I urge you to use this occasion this year and every year to help awaken concern about this in our fellow citizens.

Like it or not, old media still has a powerful influence on public opinion. You can bet the farm that it will make and break candidates during this election cycle, as it has in every cycle in our lifetimes.

The bumper stickers say "Bush Lied, People Died." But would he have gotten away with it without the media by his side?

We need to grab this bull by the horns, or failing that, to raise awareness about what comes out its other end.

Something is rotten in the state

Actual logo from the White House web page for Colin Powell's UN presentation:



When Colin Luther Powell sold himself and his country down the East River, it was a tragedy worthy of the Bard himself.

Is this anthrax which I see before me?
The vial in my hand? Come, let me hype thee.
I have thee not, and yet the media see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, senseless
Like feelings about satellite photos' sight? or art thou but
A mobile WMD lab of the mind, a false creation,
Repeated by the ratings-obsessed brainless?

I come not to bury Powell, but not to praise him, either.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's former Chief of Staff, now calls the presentation "a hoax." He blames the fraudulence not on his ex-boss, but on a politicized intelligence process.

Indeed, it does appear that warnings of widely known flaws in the presentation's source materials were kept from Powell's desk, and that at every step of the evidence-gathering process it was well-understood that only one conclusion was acceptable to the White House and the Pentagon.

Former CIA European Chief Tyler Drumheller:

I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report [about informer Curve Ball's claims]. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Don't worry about that."

I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.

The one CIA agent who met (and who didn't believe) Curve Ball was told...

"Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say. The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

Also, I don't doubt that Powell tried to rationalize a defensible route through the shoals of subterfuge, parsing away until he had pausible deniability for most everything he said. If there was no true smoking gun in Saddam Hussein's hand, there best not be one in Powell's either.

But as Al Smith observed, "no matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." Given what was at stake, it's fair to say that Powell and Wilkerson were criminally willing to suspend their disbelief:

Powell allegedly told the Foreign Secretary that he had just about "moved in" with his intelligence staff to prepare for his speech but had left his briefings "apprehensive," fearing that the evidence might "explode in their faces." A U.S. News & World Report story describes the Secretary of State throwing the documents in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit!" But the good soldier read it anyway.

It didn't take hindsight for someone with the least bit of skepticism — especially the presentation's preparer and deliverer — to see that the speech was full of speculation, convenient rewording, silly military-fantasy drawings worthy of Bruce McCall, and more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire.

If only Powell lov'd Caesar less and lov'd Rome more:

Powell... "is the world's most loyal soldier." Wilkerson said he admired that, but he took a different view of loyalty: not to the administration, but to the country.

Even if they protest their innocence too much, they at least understand it's a damned, unwashable spot on their hands.

Wilkerson:

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.

Powell:

It's a blot. I'm the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It's painful now.

Why was it painful? Perhaps because he knew it was wrong.

What makes Powell's role so tragic is his equivocation, the sense that at some level he knew he was carrying heavy water for some very dangerous fools:

I wonder what we'll do if we put half a million troops on the ground in Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and don't find a single weapon of mass destruction.

There's no evidence of such pause from those who drove the administration's policy and the determination to sex-up the evidence. To Wilkerson, that means in particular Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom he sees as hijackers of the ship of state:

Wilkerson blamed Bush, "not versed in international relations and not too much interested," for letting the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to take over. He blamed Rice for dropping her role as honest broker to "build her intimacy with the president." And he blamed whoever gave Feith "carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself."

The cabal's end run around the bureaucracy, he argued, stalled nuclear diplomacy with North Korea and Iran. He said top officials "condoned" prisoner abuse and left the Army "truly in bad shape."

"You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences," he said, "whether it was a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or the situation in Iraq which still goes unexplained."

Rumsfeld fully understood that there was no there there behind the sudden rush to war (again from Charles Hanley, who also authored this 2/7/03 AP report showing that sites Powell fear-mongered about had been thoroughly inspected and found free of WMDs):

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told U.S. senators [in July, 2003] the Bush administration actually had no "dramatic new evidence" before ordering the Iraq invasion.

For a war rationale, the Vice President had nothin' either, beyond championing a geographically quixotic application of the "9/11 changes everything" meme and willing to life non-existent connections between our forgotten enemy Al-Qaeda and his forgotten $73 million customer Iraq.

On the plus side, Cheney has shown how amazingly right he once was about the hazards of invading Iraq:

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is... fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shia government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President [George H.W. Bush] got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

Now Cheney sits in a rubber room and insists he'd never hurt a fly.

Ultimately, one must agree with both Powell and Harry Truman about where the buck stops, especially when it comes to that most dubious of propositions — a war of whim:

"The decisions that were made were not made by me or Mr. Cheney or Rumsfeld. They were made by the president of the United States."

An American Tragedy

On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations to rally support for an invasion of Iraq.

Outside of war co-planner the United Kingdom, few international troops would join the U.S. in the invasion and occupation.

Yet Powell's speech had a galvanizing effect on America's mainstream media. As one, they declared the presentation "compelling."

For a nation living in the ghostly shadow of the twin towers, the MSM's Good Warmaking seal of approval was enough to keep that treasonous question — "why?" — relatively unheard.

In this space, we'll consider what was lost that day, as we mark a sobering holiday: America's Day of Shame.