Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [27]
If the criteria for invading another country is “liberating the people from an oppressive regime,” well then, we better hurry up and institute mandatory military service for every man and woman eighteen and older because—by God—we’re going to be busy! Since we’ve already invaded Iraq to “free the Iraqis,” we might as well continue with the other countries we’ve royally screwed. After that, maybe we can head back to Afghanistan, then on to Burma, Peru, Colombia, Sierra Leone, and end up somewhere that at least sounds nice, Côte d’Ivoire.
Before the Iraq War, when the public was being duped with the endless barrage of whoppers, the idea of “liberation of the Iraqi people” was always tacked on as an afterthought. It never took a front and center position in the justifications for why we had to go to war right then. Why? Obviously those who choose our wars don’t care much about liberating people from oppressive regimes—if they did, we’d be kicking the shit out of half the world. No, they talk about “our security” and, even more important to them, “our interests.” And we all know that “our interests” have never included the good life for anyone but us. We don’t share the wealth—be it monetary or ideological—we just cover our own asses and enhance our own well-being. It’s plain to see, and it’s everywhere—from “welfare to work” to our exploitation of cheap labor to our historical love of dictators to our refusal to forgive Third World debt. Liberation sounds nice, but it ain’t worth dying for, and it sure as hell isn’t worth a dime of our money. Cheap gas, cheap clothes, cheap TVs? Yeah . . . that’s more like it!
Even professional warmonger and Bush advisor Paul Wolfowitz came clean with the truth, in the Defense Department transcript of a May 2003 interview with Vanity Fair:
The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason . . . [T]here have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there’s a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. . . .
The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.
Not worth the risk? Then why did we do it?
Of course, Wolfowitz had deviated from the script. When no weapons of mass destruction were found and not a single al Qaeda guy showed up in the parts of Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s control, and when that imminent threat Saddam posed to America’s security couldn’t be proven, the Bush administration and its many media puppets quickly tried to change their whopper order. “No, you see, we weren’t there to find nuclear weapons, we were there to free the people of Iraq! Yes, um, that’s the reason we bombed the place and sent 150,000 troops to invade!”
You know how sometimes they give you the wrong Whopper, when they’ve switched yours with someone else’s? You then have to decide whether you’re going to just go ahead and eat this other Whopper or take it back and get the one you ordered.
After the original “justifications” for war were exposed as lies, this new whopper gave pro-war Democrats and liberals a place to duck when they went looking for cover. How could they be so stupid as to believe Bush’s claims regarding the weapons of mass destruction and the 9/11 connection? “Hey, we weren’t stupid—look at all these mass graves we’ve uncovered. That’s why we supported the war—to stop this brutality and oppression!” the Democrats cried.
That’s right. Say it two more times, click your heels together and tell yourself there’s no place like home, there