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1/10/2003 03:15:00 AM | Justin In typical Orwellian fashion the writing on the White House barn that once read "Innocent until proven guilty" has just morphed unexpectedly into "guilty until proven guilty"... but wait, don't look now but I think it's just changed again... now it says "guilty especially if not proven guilty". Or maybe it said that all along and I was just to zoned out to realize it. Yawn, back to bed and my Fox News intravenous drip. For those of you wondering, I'm referring to The Bush Administration's policy on weapons inspections in Iraq. It began to say "guilty until proven guilty" when Rumsfeld began reciting the mantra "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" to anyone who would listen. (What scares me most about this phrase is that if you look it up on Google, you actually get links to a bunch of quacks arguing for the existence of UFO's. And I'd thought Reagan's schedule being almost entirely controlled by Nancy Reagan's astrologer was the last we were going to hear of this type of thing. Personally, I think all the time these people have spent contemplating Star Wars missile defense has made them a bit cooky.) Now, as weapons inspectors repeatedly turn up nothing in Iraq, the Bush administration has grown noticeably more restless, the "White House barn" has become the newspaper, and the writing on it says "guilty especially if not proven guilty". According to US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, if Iraqi doesn't come forward with evidence of its own guilt by January 27th, it will be "an extremely serious matter". So now Iraq must admit its own guilt in order to be found innocent, and is "extra guilty" if no evidence is found. Excuse me, but did someone accidentally screw the President's head on backwards again this morning? The months of January and February have long been earmarked as the official "invade Iraq" season on the Bush family hunting calendar, and they are definitely getting fidgety with the lack of evidence coming out of UN weapons inspections. Far from "confirming" the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the weapons inspectors are unearthing evidence that many US allegations were nothing more than a load of hot air: Most crucially, the central piece of evidence presented by the US -- Iraq's importation of aluminum tubes -- has been shown by weapons inspectors to have nothing to do with any alleged plan to build centrifuges for nuclear uranium. True, the aluminum importation broke Iraqi sanctions regulations, and it was, according to the inspectors, intended to built rockets, but all of this is a far cry from "evidence of weapons of mass destruction". Meanwhile, we're getting needle-in-the-haystack arguments out-the-wazoo from many commentators, who point out that Iraq is bigger than California, and very easy to hide weapons in, so how can we be expected to find the evidence before we go to war next month, and wahh! wahh! mommy! Saddam punched me while your back was turned! To the rest of the world, America must look like such a baby, because, they might explain patiently: "If you really wanted comprehensive weapons inspections, then you never should have ordered the weapons inspectors to leave Iraq in 1998, so you could bomb. What's more, it was particularly childish of you to then go around telling all your friends that it was Saddam who kicked out the weapons inspectors... You had a choice between bombing and inspections, and you chose to bomb, so live with it." After forcing the UN to withdraw all oversight in preparation for Operation Desert Fox, we're now trying to turn around and blame Iraq for lack of UN oversight. I don't mean to imply that Saddam Hussein hasn't committed War Crimes, but the Bush administration's case for war completely lacks any sense of credibility or justice. Too many of Bush's policymakers were Saddam's biggest supporters during the 80's when he committed all the crimes he's accused of (except for the invasion of Iraq, which they obviously opposed). If we're going to have justice with Saddam Hussein, let the judge not be his co-conspirators who were egging him on to commit the crimes in the first place. If we allow this sort of "mafia-style justice" to prevail, we're certain to end up with mafia-style grudges to contend with, more of the kind we faced on September 11th. ...This is my first time posting on Free Dartmouth. Hope all of this is not too grossly irrelevant to the current trend of conversation. In any case, I wanted to get a feel for people's sentiments on this seemingly inevitable war we're approaching. If invading Iraq is ok, should North Korea be next? What about Iran? Are the gross financial expenses of all of this war really a price worth paying? If not, then how can we escape being cast as unpatriotic, for opposing war (I know I did a particularly bad job at this in what I just wrote). What I want to know is how can we point out the contradictions in our own nation's foreign policy without being pidgeonholed as unamerican? Alright, I'm all blogged out for tonight. -justin perma link |
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