Brian,

From your posts here, and elsewhere, I can tell that you are intelligent and that you do read. Your reading is heavily weighted, it seems, toward the natural sciences - my favorite subject, too. During the lead-up to the Iraq war, however, I was working my usal 50-60 hours per week, and yet still found time to actually read the details of what was being held forth as justification for the proposed war, and from a variety of sources. If I seem aggravated on this subject, it is because I find it so totally frustrating that so many people went along so willingly with something it was clear was completely wrong from the start. Your statement that the fact "no WMD [were] found after the invasion is moot" is astounding! No less an authority than active duty Marine, Republican, Chief Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter, during this period prior to the war, was screaming from the rooftops to a deaf media and public that Hussein had no viable WMD, no potential to resurrect the completely defunct program he once had, and that Saddam, desperate to ward off the war he knew was coming, was completely cooperating with every U.S. demand, as demeaning and insulting as those demands had become. I refer you to an Op-Ed piece he wrote in July 2002 in the Boston Globe, "Is Iraq a True Threat to the U.S.?". URL: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0721-02.htm

His was just one of many voices from an extensive list of Middle-East experts, academics, State Department personnel,journalists (real ones), and Arabists (a great many of all these sources were non-partisan, and often even aligned with Republican interests) who, BEFORE the invasion, tried to get the mainstream media to print the truth. The thoroughly established facts that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S., had NO demonstrable connection to Al Qaeda (if Saddam had provided weapons to Osama bin Laden, Saddam would have been Osama's first victim) and that the proposed invasion was going to be a terrible disaster and had not been thought through thoroughly, could be gleaned even from the mainstream media by anyone who read carefully, all the way through the articles. And publications such as the admittedly liberal and progressive, but highly-respected weekly "Nation" strove to get the public to listen.

You write that you expected the war to be a long one. You and the aforementioned experts, then, were of a like mind. Your opinion was not shared by anyone in the Bush administration, at least not publicly. Nov. 15, 2002 - CBS NEWS: Rumsfeld, "reject[ing] concerns that a war would be a quagmire: 'The idea that it's going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind I think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990 [apparently referring to the completely non-analogous Serbian conflict], - Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that," he said."
( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/15/world/main529569.shtml ) I refer you, also, to a much more recent article from George Washington University's website. According to the U.S. Central Command's August 2002 Power Point briefing, "the U.S. would have only 5000 troops left in Iraq as of December 2006." http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB214/index.htm

As to your point that "[you] watched the same major daily news sources that everyone else did," the failures of the media and journalism in general, and the reasons for those failures, are subjects of great concern among observers of U.S. journalism and of our society. There is certainly not room here to address it thoroughly. It is one of the most important questions of our time, though. A very incomplete answer involves the increasingly corporatized nature of our media, Bush administration determination to thoroughly control the press, very real concerns that resistance to the Administration would result in access being lost, and a correct reading by media owners of the American public's mind-set (they were keenly aware of the emotional impact of the WTC attacks, and how an ignorant and easily-misled public was going to react with a desire for blind vengeance and to assert their military prowess against some of theose damned rag-heads, let God sort-em-out).

Fox "News", AKA "Faux News," or "Republican Party Slut," with an enormous market share of viewers ('cause they're ENTERTAINING!), was more than happy to cater to its corporate owner, the Administration, and its demographic viewership. Its rabid, bloodthirsty cadre of chickenhawks, they and their children safely out of harm's way, led the charge, along with the extensive list of right-wing radio talk show hosts - too numerous to mention. Why do these people still have their jobs????!!!!!

Like a great many of my ilk, I am NOT a pacifist. I used to take great pride in our military and its successes. I get a real lump in my throat reading of our noble and hugely competent World War II campaign, and even read with pride about our combatants' courage and skill in other less-well-justified wars such as Viet Nam, Korea and on and on. That such a potent, expensive and magnificent national asset as our military has been so horribly mis-used by a gang of power-hungry criminals outrages me.

MW
93420