Like Howard Dean’s yell in the aftermath of Kerry’s victory in Iowa, the State of the Union address, used to launch Bush on a positive and successful re-election campaign, just might have been Bush’s last "YEAAAAAAAAAAAARGH." Since then, nothing has gone right and signs along that highway of life aren’t pointing to prettier destinations.
After Kerry’s win in Iowa, and the day after the State of the Union, Newsweek’s poll showed Bush would lose to Kerry by 3 percentage points.
The Head of the US Weapons Inspections Team to Iraq not only resigned but leveled the Admininstration’s continuing claims that there are WMD’s hiding somewhere in the land we invaded, saying: "It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing."
Kay’s replacement, Charles Duelfer, in an interview on January 9th, said of the likelihood of finding WMDs: "[T]he prospect of finding chemical weapons, biological weapons is close to nil at this point." Inspectors have debriefed many knowledgeable Iraqi scientists, who "have every incentive to show them where the WMD are, and they have come up with nothing." (From the article "Nothing to Preempt" by Ray McGovern, )
The Democrats are calling for an independent investigation into why the intelligence failed.
In Australia, the Australian Senate has formally censured Prime Minister John Howard for misleading the country on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). In New Hampshire, voter turnout was the highest in history, indicating a determination to oust Bush. (McGovern)
US troops have been dying nearly on a daily basis from a wave of violence, from bombings, attacks, or helicopter crashes. The total US casualties now exceed 530.
Suicide bombings still plague Israel, the latest today which killed 10 and injured 50.
US troops have been charged for abuse in Iraq.
The Human Rights Report was released on the 26th and the report concluded that the US invasion of Iraq was not "humanitarian."
On the economical front, days after the State of the Union address which touted an upswing in jobs and the economy, Kodak announced that it was laying off over 15, 000 employees.
And as I noted yesterday, even though many conservatives feel Blair (and thus Bush) are totally vindicated because of Hutton’s report, they are assuming wrong. Britain is crying "whitewash." Citizens and the leaders that represent them in Britain, America, and Australia, to name the majority, are calling for independent investigations.
More pointedly, as Seumas Milne wrote in his Guardian column "The Shadow of Iraq,"
[W]hatever the mixture of motives, Hutton's unqualified endorsement of the government's behaviour is bound, in the current climate, to be widely regarded in the country as a cover-up. It will have no credibility for millions who opposed the war on Iraq; it will merely add to the sense that the political system is unable to deal with the crisis triggered by Britain's participation in the illegal invasion and occupation.
Indeed, as Bush travels the country pushing his vision for another term, the vision he has created the past few years lie about him like the shackles on Marley’s Ghost. He (and his administration and Blair) have been urging us to move on, look past the events that allowed him to take us to war against Iraq. This might be easy for him, I guess. But how do we do that when the blood of our soldiers is still being spilt there?
I leave you with Milne’s closing paragraphs, a poignant reply to why it is important we don’t move on.
[T]he misery of the occupation of Iraq grows, as US and British claims to have liberated the country are exposed as a fraud. While the resistance continues to inflict daily casualties on the occupation forces in the centre and north of Iraq - regardless of the capture of Saddam Hussein - the Shia religious leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani has put himself at the head of a mass popular movement for democracy, opposed by the very US occupiers who insisted they were invading to trigger a democratic revolution across the Middle East.
There are now around 13,000 Iraqis imprisoned without trial; evidence of torture and brutality by US and British occupation forces is growing; and the CIA has warned that Iraq is at risk of slipping into a three-way civil war. For most Iraqis, life has got worse under the occupation and even on the crudest calculus, many more have been killed since Saddam Hussein was overthrown than in his last period in power: as the US-based Human Rights Watch pointed out this week, Saddam's worst atrocities date from the days when he was backed by the west.
This is the legacy of the decision by Tony Blair and George Bush to invade a country that posed no threat either to Britain or to the US. There is no way in which the Iraq war can somehow be put behind us. That is not only because of what is now happening on the ground in Iraq, but because of the increased threat of terror attacks it has brought about, the precedent of pre-emptive war it has created, and the poison released in the British political system by a war launched on a false prospectus. Nor is it enough for the prime minister to say he believed there was a threat at the time. If that is the case, he is guilty of reckless incompetence.
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