Worth Repeating

Thanks to Alternet.


Senate Floor Remarks - May 21, 2003

Senator Robert Byrd, WVA.

"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 we humans may go to
obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of
squeezing out through the cracks, eventually.

But the danger is that at some point it may no longer
matter. The danger is that damage is done before the truth
is widely realized. The reality is that, sometimes, it is
easier to ignore uncomfortable facts and go along with
whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We see a lot of
this today in politics. I see a lot of it – more than I would
ever have believed – right on this Senate Floor.

Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator
that the American people may have been lured into
accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation,
in violation of long-standing International law, under false
premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events
of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to
switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda
who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to
Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion
of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet
invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from
mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to
drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major
cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement
concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to our
freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure
reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination
of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the
attacks of 9/11. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a
placebo for the anger.

Since the war's end, every subsequent revelation which
has seemed to refute the previous dire claims of the Bush
Administration has been brushed aside. Instead of
addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House
deftly changes the subject. No weapons of mass
destruction have yet turned up, but we are told that they
will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But, our costly and
destructive 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. It seems also to
have, for the present, verified the assertions of Hans Blix
and the inspection team 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 they do, indeed,
exist. Meanwhile Bin Laden is still on the loose and
Saddam Hussein has come up missing.

The Administration assured the U.S. public and the world,
over and over again, that an attack was necessary to
protect our people and the world from terrorism. It
assiduously worked to alarm the public and blur the faces
of 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 no immediate threat to the U.S. Ravaged by
years of sanctions, Iraq did not even lift an airplane
against us. Iraq's threatening death-dealing fleet of
unmanned drones about which we heard so much
morphed into one prototype made of plywood and string.
Their missiles proved to be outdated and of limited range.
Their army was quickly overwhelmed by our technology
and our well trained troops.

Presently our loyal military personnel continue their
mission of diligently searching for WMD. They have so
far turned up only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional
weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool. They
are misused on such a mission and they continue to be at
grave risk. But the Bush team's extensive hype of WMD
in Iraq as justification for a preemptive invasion has
become more than embarrassing. It has raised serious
questions about prevarication and the reckless use of
power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were
countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when war was
not really necessary? Was the American public
deliberately misled? Was the world?

What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim
that we are "liberators." The facts don't seem to support
the label we have so euphemistically attached to ourselves.
True, we have unseated a brutal, despicable despot, but
"liberation" implies the follow up of freedom,
self-determination and a better life for the common
people. 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, water is scarce, and often foul, electricity is a
sometime thing, food is in short supply, hospitals are
stacked with the wounded and maimed, historic treasures
of the region and of the Iraqi people have been looted,
and nuclear material may have been disseminated to
heaven knows where, while U.S. troops, on orders,
looked on and guarded the oil supply.

Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq's
infrastructure and refurbish its oil industry are awarded to
Administration cronies, without benefit of competitive
bidding, and the U.S. steadfastly resists offers of U.N.
assistance to participate. Is there any wonder that the real
motives of the U.S. government are the subject of
worldwide speculation and mistrust?

And in what may be the most damaging development, the
U.S. appears to be pushing off Iraq's clamor for
self-government. Jay Garner has been summarily replaced,
and it is becoming all too clear that the smiling face of the
U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an
occupier. The image of the boot on the throat has
replaced the beckoning hand of freedom. Chaos and
rioting only exacerbate that image, as U.S. soldiers try to
sustain order in a land ravaged by poverty and disease.
"Regime change" in Iraq has so far 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's gun. To think otherwise is folly. One has
to stop and ponder. How could we have been 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 at odds with the
galloping materialism which drives the western-style
economies?

As so many warned this Administration before it launched
its misguided war on Iraq, there is evidence that our crack
down in Iraq is likely to convince 1,000 new Bin Ladens
to plan other horrors of the type we have seen in the past
several days. Instead of damaging the terrorists, we have
given them new fuel for their fury. We did not complete
our mission in Afghanistan because we were so eager to
attack Iraq. Now it appears that Al Queda is back with a
vengeance. We have returned to orange alert in the U.S.,
and we may well have destabilized the Mideast region, a
region we have never fully understood. We have alienated
friends around the globe with our dissembling and our
haughty insistence on punishing former friends who may
not see things quite our way.

The path of diplomacy and reason have gone out the
window to be replaced by force, unilateralism, and
punishment for transgressions. I read most recently with
amazement our harsh castigation of Turkey, our longtime
friend and strategic ally. It is astonishing that our
government is berating the new Turkish government for
conducting its affairs in accordance with its own
Constitution and its democratic institutions.

Indeed, we may have sparked a new international arms
race as countries move ahead to develop WMD as a last
ditch attempt to ward off a possible preemptive strike
from a newly belligerent U.S. which claims the right to hit
where it wants. In fact, there is little to constrain this
President. Congress, in what will go down in history as its
most unfortunate act, handed away its power to declare
war for the foreseeable future and empowered this
President to wage war at will.

As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are
reluctant to ask questions which are begging to be asked.
How long will we occupy Iraq? We have already heard
disputes on the numbers of troops which will be needed
to retain order. What is the truth? How costly will the
occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight
answer. How will we afford this long-term massive
commitment, fight terrorism at home, address a serious
crisis in domestic healthcare, afford behemoth military
spending and give away billions in tax cuts amidst a deficit
which has climbed to over $340 billion for this year alone?
If the President's tax cut passes it will be $400 billion. We
cower in the shadows while false statements proliferate.
We accept soft answers and shaky explanations because
to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular, or may be
politically costly.

But, I contend that, through it all, the people know. The
American people unfortunately are used to political
shading, spin, and the usual chicanery they hear from
public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a point. But
there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink for
a time, but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged
with anger. When it comes to shedding American blood –
when it comes to wreaking havoc on civilians, on innocent
men, women, and children, callous dissembling is not
acceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie – not oil, not
revenge, not reelection, not somebody's grand pipedream
of a democratic domino theory.

And mark my words, the calculated intimidation which we
see so often of late by the "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.