a new anniversary to mourn

"(…) The bombing of Baghdad ten years ago marked the beginning of another senseless American war fought for reasons that turned out not to exist, driven by wrongheaded, cockeyed, and manipulated intelligence.

We know the history. After a few weeks in which the Iraqi Army scattered without putting up much of a fight, the situation quickly got out of control. By mid-2004, with a Presidential election under way, it was clear to many that we were deep into a guerrilla war that would turn out badly and take the lives of thousands of Americans, and many times that number of Iraqis. And yet George Bush, the man who brought us there, won reelection that November.

So the question that presents itself is: What’s up with our Constitution? How could a small group of hard-line conservatives around President Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a few neoconservatives so quickly throw us over the cliff? This included not only a war fought on false pretenses but also a system of torture and indefinite detention that, in far too many cases, ran against our laws and values (and was only partially checked by the Supreme Court). It’s not enough to blame it on the fear, anger, and confusion brought on by the 9/11 attacks. What happened to our press corps with its alleged independence and its commitment to the First Amendment and the values of the rest of the Bill of Rights? What about Congressional oversight- laughable in the run-up to the war, and even more laughable today, as American enters its twelfth year of its worldwide War on Terror. Is our Constitution that fragile? (…)"

(...) Vietnam. And Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have a lot of anniversaries to forget.

by Seymour M. Hersh in "The New Yorker"