PunkAssBlog.com

People say the Bush administration hasn’t learned from history, and maybe that’s true, but they’ve certainly learned from the future. Even if the date of that future is in the past. I guess what I mean to say is, “holy fuck did the Bush administration do a good job of making 1984 come alive.”

Any good Orwellian will tell you that you can’t live in permanent Big Brothery without constant war to distract and cow the populace. By scheming his way into the Iraq debacle, Bush has now officially made his lie the truth:

The [intelligence agency] findings focused most heavily on Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, which was judged to remain the most serious threat to the United States. The group’s affiliate in Iraq, which has not yet posed a direct threat to U.S. soil, could do just that, the report concluded. Al-Qaida in Iraq threatened to attack the United States in a Web statement last September.

The Iraqi affiliate also helps al-Qaida more broadly as it tries to energize Sunni Muslim extremists around the globe, raise resources and recruit and indoctrinate operatives — “including for homeland attacks,” according to a declassified summary of the report’s main findings.

Interestingly, an earlier version of this AP article explicitly noted that the Iraq version of al-Qaida went from non-existent to one of the most powerful arms of terrorism and the group most intent on attacking the US. Now, the piece just indicates that they are a danger; it dropped the suggestion that we created our greatest threat by invading Iraq. I’m sure that edit was totally grammar-related, though.

Of course, for all we know, this whole report is just partisan tripe designed to provide flimsy justification for continuing the war. It’s been well-documented that agencies have been purged at all levels of all but the toadiest of cronies. But whatever “scary foreign name” we choose to give them, I have no trouble believing our bumbling conquest has generated whole swaths of people who’d give their lives to strike back at America.

So, let’s review.

We have a president who stole one election to gain power and another to keep it, all while continuing to find new ways to violate our Constitution. He also occupied a country without cause and fostered so much international instability that we’ve lost our friends and made millions of enemies who have nothing to lose. As a result, the fake enemy is now real. And in the eyes of many, the unwinnable war must now be continued because we can’t afford to lose. And the future deaths of thousands of Americans and millions of people that don’t seem entirely real to those same Americans may be assured. All we have left to do is restart the Cold War.

Oh, wait.