Let bygones be bygones?
Not
Not, according to Dennis Kucinich anyway. Via A Tiny Revolution, here is a post-election interview with Rep. Kucinich. In comments about the falsehoods leading to the Iraq war, Dennis says clearly what I have felt for a long time, “…we cannot heal America if we continue with policies that are based on lies.”
Dennis calls for what would be a Truth Commission: “We need to have hearings on Iraq again. We need to go over again why we went there…. We’Â’ll never be able to bring closure to this Iraq matter unless we tell the truth about what happened.”
It is impossible to have a meaningful discourse on Iraq if nobody wants to look back on how we got there. Without a basis in truth, we’re forced into accepting Bush’s outrageous conception of a noble project that is making us safer and leading to “freedom” for the Iraqis.
No help in this direction will come from the Democrats, not without a lot of public pressure anyway. Impeachment is “off the table” according to Nancy Pelosi. Other top Democrats, like Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and Chuck Shumer, are getting well-practiced saying things like we need to be “moving forward on an agenda, finding things that we can agree on to start off on the right foot”, and, “The only way to move forward is with bipartisanship and openness, and to get some results….and that’s what we’re going to do”, and, “If we are seen as just blocking the president, it will not serve us well in 2008.”
Fine, if all we expect is business as usual with a slight adjustment in who is holding the gavel. But business as usual is not enough any more. What has happened in Iraq is a really, really big transgression, of global-historical scale, committed by corrupt and morally bankrupt American leaders guilty of the supreme crime–a Crime Against Peace. This enterprise will bankrupt all of our souls if we let the Democrats keep the door open for the president’s agenda without examining this hard truth.
November 23rd, 2006 at 21:04
Excellent post, Deep Blade. How is it that Americans have come to believe that truth is something that “gets in the way of business”? It is a perversion of the Christian teaching of forgiveness.
I really hope that you and other like-minded bloggers will continue to call for “keeping up the pressure on the Democrats.”
November 25th, 2006 at 09:59
Have to agree. What is needed is a robust analytical framework based on pertinent questions regarding the as yet unstated reasons for going to war. This requires too dismantling the “liberal-democratic” discourse hujacked by the Bush administration and Democrats in order to crtically question purported utopian outcomes allegedly accruing from particular pragmatic interventions. For example, since regime change was one of the obvious rationales behind the war - euphemistically framed as liberation - we must question the valididity of teh argument that simply by removing the serpent’s head the serpent will die. In my research I have discovered that policies predicated on the latter invariably cause chaos, or, in Bush doublespeak “stability”. By removing the only stabilisng factor in a country for the sake of “liberation” you are basically sending that country to Hell. In other words, the interpretation of universal liberty used by the Bush admin in this context, believed to apply to each and any situation, invariably leads to unbridled chaos. WHich leads us to the question, why did they not know this? Or, did they know it but just didn’t acknowledge it? Or, were there other aganedas at play which trumped upholding the guding myths of the great nation? As we all know there is evidence to suggest the latter and the former, but how do we set up a tribunal that deals with these issues empirically? A challenge indeed, but a worthy one.
God Bless
November 25th, 2006 at 17:41
Thank you Caryl & Wallsy for your comments. I’ve had a look at Caryl’s blog and I definitely recommend it. I find especially pertinent the recent post on “Return of the Republic”. I’m rather a fan of Karen Armstrong. I have had a post going on the Glenn Beck anti-Islam propaganda piece recently broadcast over the CNN cesspool that also contains the insufferable Nancy Grace. I wish I could get the darn thing done. It’s interesting how rabid the Horowitz/Frontpage/Jihadwatch/Spencer/LGF crowd becomes when it confronts the heresy of fair-minded treatment of struggle between Western imperial power and Islamic reaction.
November 29th, 2006 at 20:54
Karen Armstrong is amazing. Have you read her “A History of Islam”; very very good.