Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers.
Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it.Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths wehumans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way ofsqueezing out through the cracks, eventually.
But the danger is that at some point it may no longer matter. The danger isthat damage is done before the truth is widely recognized and realized. Thereality is that, sometimes, it is easier to ignore uncomfortable facts and goalong with whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We see a lot of thistoday in politics. I see a lot of it—more than I ever would havebelieved—right on this Senate floor.
Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that theAmerican people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of asovereign nation, in violation of long-standing international law, under falsepremises.
There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have beencarefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaidawho masterminded the September 11 attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. Therun up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of hisCabinet invoking every frightening image that they could conjure, from mushroomclouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germladen death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose ofoverstatement concerning Saddam Hussein’s direct threat to our freedoms.The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation stillsuffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable angerafter the attacks of 9/11. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebofor the anger.
Since the war’s end, every subsequent revelation which has seemed torefute the previous dire claims of the Bush administration has been brushedaside. Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftlychanges the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but weare told that they will in time. And perhaps they yet will. But, our costly anddestructive bunker busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the main,precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to go in. Itseems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix andthe inspection team that he led, which President Bush and company so derided.As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such weapons, if theydo, indeed, exist. Meanwhile bin Laden is still on the loose out theresomewhere and Saddam Hussein has come up missing.
The administration assured the U.S. public and the world, over and over andover again, that an attack was necessary to protect our people and the worldfrom terrorism. It assiduously worked to alarm the public and to blur the facesof Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden until they virtually became one.
What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq was noimmediate threat to the United States, and many of us here said so before thewar. Ravaged by years of sanctions, Iraq did not even lift an airplane againstus. Saddam Hussein could not even get an airplane off the ground. Iraq’sthreatening death-dealing fleet of unmanned drones about which we heard so muchmorphed into one prototype made of plywood and string. Their missiles proved tobe outdated and of limited range. Their army was quickly overwhelmed by ourtechnology and our well trained troops.
Presently our loyal military personnel continue their mission of diligentlysearching for weapons of mass destruction. They have so far turned up onlyfertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buriedswimming pool. They are misused on such a mission and they continue to be atgrave risk. I am talking about the sons and daughters of the American people.The Bush team’s extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for apreemptive invasion has become more than embarrassing. It has raised seriousquestions about prevarication and the reckless use of power. Were our troopsneedlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraqi civilians—women,children—killed and maimed when war was not really necessary? Was theAmerican public deliberately misled? Was the world?
What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are“liberators.” Vice President CHENEY, 3 days before the war,said we will be welcomed as liberators. The facts don’t seem to supportthe label we have so euphemistically attached to ourselves. True, we haveunseated a brutal, despicable despot, but “liberation” implies thefollowup of freedom, self-determination and a better life for the common peopleof the invaded country. In fact, if the situation in Iraq is the result of“liberation,” we may have set the cause of freedom back 200 years.
Despite our high-blown claims of a better life for the Iraqi people, wateris scarce, and often foul; electricity is a sometime thing; food is in shortsupply; hospitals are stacked with the wounded and maimed. Historic treasuresof the region and of the Iraqi people have been looted, and nuclear materialmay have been disseminated to heaven knows where, while U.S. troops, on orders,looked on and guarded the oil supply. That is what they were told to do.
Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure andrefurbish its oil industry are awarded to administration cronies, withoutbenefit of competitive bidding, and the United States steadfastly resistsoffers of U.N. assistance to participate. Is there any wonder that the realmotives of the U.S. Government are the subject of worldwide speculation andmistrust?
And in what may be the most damaging development, the U.S. appears to bepushing off Iraq’s clamor for self-government. Jay Garner has beensummarily replaced, and it is becoming all too clear that the smiling face ofthe U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an occupier. The imageof the boot on the throat has replaced the beckoning hand of freedom. Chaos andrioting only exacerbate that image, as U.S. soldiers try to sustain order in aland ravaged by poverty and disease. “Regime change” in Iraq has sofar meant anarchy, curbed only by an occupying military force and a U.S.administrative presence that is evasive about if and when it intends to depart.
Democracy and freedom cannot be force fed at the point of an occupier’sgun. To think otherwise is folly. One has to stop and ponder. How could we havebeen so impossibly naive? How could we expect to easily plant a clone of U.S.culture, values, and government in a country so riven with religious,territorial, and tribal rivalries, so suspicious of U.S. motives, and so atodds with the galloping materialism which drives the western-style economies?
As so many warned this administration before it launched its misguided waron Iraq, there is evidence that our crackdown in Iraq is likely to convince1,000 new bin Ladens to plan other horrors of the type we have seen in the pastseveral days. Instead of damaging the terrorists, we have given them new fuelfor their fury. We did not complete our mission in Afghanistan because we wereso eager to attack Iraq. Now it appears that al-Qaida is back with a vengeance.We have returned to orange alert in the U.S., and we may well have destabilizedthe Mideast region, a region we have never fully understood. We have alienatedfriends around the globe with our dissembling and our haughty insistence onpunishing former friends who may not see things quite our way. The path ofdiplomacy and reason have gone out the window to be replaced by force,unilateralism, and punishment for transgressions. I read most recently withamazement our harsh castigation of Turkey, our longtime friend and strategically. It is astonishing that our Government is berating the new Turkishgovernment for conducting its affairs in accordance with its own Constitutionand its democratic institutions.
Indeed, we may have sparked a new international arms race as countries moveahead to develop WMD as a last ditch attempt to ward off a possible preemptivestrike from a newly belligerent U.S. bully which claims the right to hit whereand when it wants. In fact, there is little to constrain this President. ThisCongress, in what will go down in history as its most unfortunate and spinelessand thoughtless act, gave away its power to declare war for the foreseeablefuture and empowered this President to wage war at will, and not only thisPresident, but also future Presidents.
The amendment that I offered to sunset this nefarious handover of power wasrejected by the Senate and garnered only 31 votes. I was amazed, and I am stillamazed, that this Senate would reject an amendment to sunset a thoughtless,nefarious, spineless act on the part of this same Senate to hand over thispower to declare war to this President. I cannot believe that the Senate didthat. Even now, I cannot believe it. It is abhorrent that the Senate would haverejected the sunset provision. So, as it is, there is no sunset. That powergoes on after this President. The next President will have the same power,unless Congress steps in and changes the law. Of course, a President can veto achange in the law and that veto, as students of the Constitution will know,will require a two-thirds vote to override. It is hard to believe that grown,sensible men and women would reject that sunset provision—to say nothingof having voted to shift this power over to any President, whether he is aDemocrat or Republican.
As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are reluctant to askquestions which are begging to be asked. How long will we occupy Iraq? We havealready heard disputes on the numbers of troops that will be needed to retainorder. What is the truth? How costly will the occupation and the reconstructionbe? No one has given a straight answer. How will we afford this long-term,massive commitment, fight terrorism at home, address the serious crisis indomestic health care, afford behemoth military spending, and give away billionsin tax cuts amidst a deficit which has climbed to over $340 billion for thisyear alone? If the President’s tax cut passes, it will be $400 billion.We cower in the shadows while false statements proliferate. We accept softanswers and shaky explanations because to demand the truth is hard, orunpopular, or may be politically costly.
But I contend that, through it all, the people know. The American people,unfortunately, are used to political shading, political spin, and the usualchicanery they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to apoint. But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink for atime, but eventually it will appear in dark colors tinged with anger. When itcomes to shedding American blood, and when it comes to wreaking havoc oncivilians, on innocent women, men, and children, callous dissembling is notacceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie—not oil, not revenge, notreelection, not somebody’s grand pipe dream of a democratic dominotheory.
Mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we see so often of late bythe “powers that be” will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just so long because, eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge.And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall!
—Congressional Record 21 May 2003: S6806.