Truth - Al Franken [118]
You can’t count on them to count terrorist attacks. You can’t count on them to count civilian victims. You can’t count on them to listen to military commanders and send in enough troops, or to not lie about the commanders asking them to send more troops, or to listen to Colin Powell and not torture people, or to not lie about whether the torture policies started at the top.
You can’t trust them to care. About Iraqis. About Americans.
You can’t trust them to do the work of actually signing killed-in-action letters. You can’t trust them not to lie about not signing killed-in-action letters.
You can’t count on them to acknowledge any mistakes whatsoever. You can’t trust them not to lie when confronted with those mistakes.
You can’t trust them not to believe their own propaganda.
You can’t trust them. Period.
I don’t know what to do in Iraq. I don’t trust them to stay, and I don’t trust them to leave. They send the right-wing media out there to say that any of us who have been critical of the war at all just want to cut and run. I don’t. I want us to succeed in Iraq, but I don’t know if it’s possible. I’ve wrestled with this, talking to people on all sides of the issue. Some people think that our presence there creates more chaos, and that we should leave. Other people think leaving will cause a civil war, but others say we already have one. Most believe that whenever we leave, there will be more chaos—but that that will be true whether we leave now or five years from now, so we should start phasing out now.
Other people think it’s possible to negotiate with the Sunni insurgents, and work with other countries to seal the borders and stop foreign jihadists from entering. Some people think that the only way to defeat an insurgency is to send in hundreds of thousands more troops—and others think that that would have helped three years ago, but that it’s too late now.
But as much as I and others have agonized over this, it doesn’t matter. The Bush administration does not care what you or I think should happen in Iraq. Six to eight people make the decisions, and they don’t listen to anybody else. And the Republican Congress has let them get away with it. They have refused to hold anyone to account. Every day, they have a chance to do their job—and they don’t do it.
If you want to know what I think we should do in Iraq, it’s that we should think about what we have to do in America. We have to throw these guys out.
Step one is 2006.
The work starts now.
Epilogue
The Resurrection of Hope
15 A Letter to My Grandchildren
October 2, 2015
Dear Barack, Hillary, and Joe III,
Your grandmother and I were married forty years ago today. Little did we dream back then that we would have three grandchildren as beautiful as you.
Barack, I’ll never forget the moment I first saw you in the maternity ward at the hospital, and your mother asked me to suggest a name. In retrospect, I guess it was kind of an obvious choice, but at the time I had no idea that Barack would soon become America’s second most popular baby name, after Aidan. Hillary, when you came along two years later, you had your mother’s eyes and your father’s hemophilia. Thanks to advances in stem cell science, we were able to take care of the hemophilia. The eyes we left alone.
Joe III, you’re the baby of the family. Although you can’t read this yet, I think that one day, you’ll find what I’m about to write as interesting as you currently find my ring of shiny, jangling keys.
This letter is my legacy to you, my beloved grandchildren, along with the million dollars each of you will receive thanks to your grandmother’s prudent investments in T-bills, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. Thanks to the fiscal prudence of Democrats after Bush left office, that makes them the most secure investment we can possibly leave you.
Here’s what I want you to know.
Just as I