My Thoughts on the Downing Street Memo

Let me take you back to that horrible autumn of 2001. America was on its knees, grieving over an unspeakable butchering of the innocents. We were all stunned dumb with grief, trying to cope, trying to help each others to cope. The smoke and the smell of burning and death hung over New York City. I know. I lost a relative that day. He never came home to his waiting bride. His mother died recently. She gave up on life on 9/11/2001. She wanted answers, an explanation, something, and she got nothing, not even one speck of his remains. Then she grew tired and neglected her checkups and told nobody about the pain and then she died. Another victim, and there are probably many of them.

When we were finally ready for the questions to come we asked them. Who did this? Who is responsible? How can the culprits be brought into justice? And we learned about Osama bin Laden and the other Saudis, we learned about the Taliban and the support it gave Al Qaeda. The war in Afghanistan followed. Now put yourself back into the time in late autumn of 2001. Osama bin Laden had not been found. The Taliban were scattered but Afghanistan was not in any sense under control. Every day new information appeared on Al Qaeda, its presence in many countries and its plans.

America was grieving and burying its dead but it was finally ready for justice, for the hunt of the killers to be made real. And what did George Bush give us?

He gave us a long-hatched vendetta against Iraq, a country ruled by an evil dictator, true, but a country that had been ruled by the same evil dictator for a long time and once the Americans liked him well enough. But suddenly, in the middle of this major crisis, when bin Laden was using the world media to bare his butt to George Bush, suddenly, when there wasn't enough money to inspect the ships coming into the U.S. ports for nuclear weapons, suddenly, this was the right time to go and take Saddam out. Not to go after the real terrorists that threatened the U.S., but to take out someone who had nothing to do with 9/11.

When you are told that you suffer from a frightening form of cancer, do you go out and spend all your savings on getting those varicose veins removed? Well, that is pretty much what George Bush decided to do. Except that it's not just money we are spending on the varicose veins of Iraq but also lives. And all for what? Oil? Weapons of mass destruction? Some old Bush family quarrel having to do with prick sizes? Now, remember that in 2001 we were told nothing about the big boots of freedom marching all over the Iraqis. That's a later recreation of the events. In 2001 we were told that getting the varicose veins removed was more important than fighting the cancer that was spreading rapidly. So.

This is the place where the Downing Street memos fit. The proof that all I have said here is true. The proof of not only lying by our government but of incompetency, of voluntary sacrifice of all those lives that have been lost in Iraq. And what about Afghanistan? How are things going there? Where the hell is Osama bin Laden? Where are all those materials that disappeared in Iraq, materials which can be used to make biological weapons, for example? On some freight boat making its way across the ocean right now? Making its way towards whom? Think about this.