Today I break down and create a “War” category, finally, in honor of two things:

1) The appearance of a great example of unvarnished American free press. I speak of a column from Frank Rich (discussed further below). Rich tells the American people the seeming truth about what we’ve learned regarding the Bush administration’s Iraq lies and propaganda.

2) The emergence of a powerful anti-war movement, led by grieving mother Cindy Sheehan.

You won’t find a great deal about the Iraq war on the Radmod site, just some pieces about the propaganda and hypocrisy behind the war and its supporters.

I am not a pacifist. Hell, I’m even a veteran! And I like to wear a little American Flag ring, and I love the good old USA and what it stands for.

But I hate unnecessary war and death and killling and torture and propaganda and lies, and so does the rest of the civilized world. Iraq was unnecessary. And, sorry Rush, the abuse of prisoners was not akin to a fraternity hazing (where the hazees were there voluntarily!)

—–

If you are a Bush supporter, have you noticed that when you try to deny that Bush engaged in lies and propaganda to get us into an uncessary war, that you have almost zero persuasive power to your arguments when trying to convince people? That’s because you are among the “faithful” backers of the GOP war machine no matter what the facts show. Others do not share your “faith”, and they demand real facts and truth.

Faith is not, and never has been, much susceptible to logic. You either have faith in the GOP war machine or you don’t. You have few facts or logical arguments to use to persuade the non-faithful to see things your way on the Iraq issue.

To the contrary, the non-faithful have quite an arsenal of real facts to show that Bush’s people (and Bush himself) lied and propagandized our way to war in Iraq. Frank Rich summarizes the best of those facts in the article excerpted below.

The non-faithful are winning the argument over Iraq, as eventually happened over Vietnam (another political war rather than a necessary war).

And the polls are apparently showing it, and the GOP is becoming Very concerned. For just one example of How concerned, have you noticed that the “War on Terror” ™ [A/K/A “WAT”] has morphed into something now referred to as “The global struggle against extremism” ™ [A/K/A “GSAE”]. (Makes me wonder if the GOP is trying to tone down its reputation as the party of expensive unnecessary warmongering, in time for the 2006 elections.

—-

Here’s the link to the Frank Rich column, for your email distribution list: It’s a long column by Frank Rich of the New York Times, listing the most outrageous bullshit of the Bush Administration and the neocons and their Limbaugh-Hannity-FoxNews spinwit minions.

See Rich’s column for a concise summary of many of the truths that are now part of the Legend of the Iraq Debacle ™.

Here’s a very brief excerpt from the Rich column:

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over by Frank Rich.

. . . The president said that “we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade,” an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam “could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year” were he able to secure “an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball.” Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were “highly dubious.”

Below is a second excerpt from the Rich column. The link below is actually from a diary over at DailyKOS, where they’ve been quoting from, and discussing, the Frank Rich column.

Daily Kos: Bush’s Splendid Little War

[…]
In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, “The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war,” adding that the “essential” lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have “politicians making military decisions.” But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army’s chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it’s our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn’t been before 9/11 - “the central front in the war on terror,” as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he’s the one who recklessly created it.
[…]