March 7, 2005

Hindsight is Not Always 20/20

South Knox Bubba thinks he's found proof that President Bush and his evil henchmen began planning for the Iraq war back in 1996, right after Bush got elected governor of Texas. Here's the link: http://www.southknoxbubba.net/skblog/archive_2005_03.php#4025. You'll probably have to cut and paste it into your browser address bar because SKB continues to divert visitors coming from HobbsOnline to the FreeRepublic site because he's not done acting like a two-year-old.

In the piece, Bubba contents that a 1996 Pentagon document titled Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance lays out the blueprint for the future Iraq war that the Bushies were scheming. The document of course is nothing but one written by military planners describing how massive and sudden destruction could cause an enemy to rapidly capitulate, and laying out possible ways to achieve it. It is the kind of thing American military planners do and ought to be doing - devise ways to win wars quickly with as little loss of American life as possible should war be thrust upon America.

Bubba says the document "puts the war in Iraq in a different perspective" and proves the Bushies "have manipulated events and manufactured threats to push America towards a dangerous and reckless foreign policy."

Now, what big relevant event happened between 1996 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Was it:

A. Britney Spears' 52-hour marriage.
B. Jacko's indictment.
C. Scientists cloned a sheep.
or
D. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, in which Islamofascist terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on American soil.

The basic problem with Bubba's post today is that he is applying the lens of hindsight to a speculative document written four years before Bush was elected president, and five years before the attack on America, and imbuing it with meaning it did not have. Bush wasn't president when Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance was written. It was written during the Clinton administration by Clinton's Pentagon, and it was not a blueprint to take America into war but a plan for winning war if war was thrust upon us.

Some of us believe the smoke rising from Ground Zero on September 11 was not smoke-and-mirrors, but the launch of an actual war against America by hostile forces. Some of us recall September 11 and believe that the most effective response is one that addresses the root cause of Islamofascist terrorism - repression and privation by Middle Eastern tyrannies both secular and religious - rather than a pinprick response or a singular focus on nabbing bin Laden. Others see only a "manufactured threat" and "manipulated events" and retroactively read dark conspiracy theories into pre-September 11 documents.

The blogosphere is indeed, as Michael Silence calls it, "a collection of voices." Some of them are the voices of the village idiots.