Hard to believe it’s just 7 years since the invasion of Iraq at 5:34 AM (Baghdad time) on March 20, 2003

Here’s what the NYTimes reports American commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, saying this month:

“People have to get past why we came here.”

Why we came here. Yes, let’s forget all about that. We should ignore the past and look to the future, as John Howard kept saying. “Oh, you know, I don’t think the Australian people are interested in worrying about that any more.” Yes, let’s forget the traitorous dishonesty of the bigname players in the US, Britain and Australia that led us into it. Let’s ignore the wholesale slaughter and social disruption intentionally unleashed by deeply stupid psychopaths on innocent Iraqis for bogus, trumped up and “sexed-up” lies; let’s forget the war crimes for which Bush, Blair, Howard, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, Feith and so many others still have not been charged.

For instance, let’s forget this bit of “why we came here“:

…when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with President Bush that there was no connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld initiated a secret program to reexamine the evidence and marginalize the CIA and Tenet. A major part of this program was a Pentagon unit known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP), created by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and headed by Douglas Feith to supply senior Bush administration officials with raw intelligence pertaining to Iraq, unvetted by intelligence analysts, and circumventing traditional intelligence gathering operations by the CIA. The questionable intelligence acquired by the OSP was “stovepiped” to Cheney and presented to the public.

In some cases, Cheney’s office would leak the intelligence to news correspondents, who would cover it in such outlets as The New York Times. Cheney would subsequently appear on the Sunday political television talk shows to discuss the intelligence, pointing to The New York Times reportage as corroboration of his view.

Let’s ignore how the media, morally-castrated party politicians, servile public servants, and all of us, allowed these awful, arrogant, anti-democratic liars and butchers to get away with the horrors, the social divisiveness and the corruption and corrosion of democratic values that they did.

After all, what could we possibly learn for the future?

[tags]Iraq, Iraq War, war crimes, 2003, Tenet, US, Britain, Australia, Bush, Blair, Howard, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, Feith, media, politicians, public servants, Office of Special Plans, OSP, Baghdad, Odierno[/tags]