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Repeat after me: we told you so
The Age (AU)
By Terry Lane
September 17, 2006

There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There weren't before the invasion and there aren't now. Just as those opposed to the war have argued all along. After the thorough going-over that the country got from Scott Ritter, Richard Butler and Hans Blix, it was obvious. The anti-warriors are now entitled to say, we told you so.

Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program using uranium from Niger, as George Bush claimed. His claim was based on a fake letter. We told you so.

Now the CIA tells us that Saddam Hussein had no links with Osama bin Laden nor al-Quaeda and was not responsible for the terror strikes against America in 2001. The Senate Intelligence Committee report released this week makes it clear that the US Administration had been told that there were no such links and that the words of the members of the Iraqi National Congress in exile were not to be trusted because they were self-serving liars. We told you so.

Now an Age commentator admonishes the left for not caring about Iraqi homosexuals, trade unionists and feminists (The Age, September 11).

There might not have been any weapons. There was no nuclear program. The terrorists of 2001 did not have links with Iraq. The information that Bush and his cronies preferred to believe came from liars. Never mind all that: what about the feminists?

Now this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find some justification for an invasion that has cost tens of thousands of lives. Can someone explain how a woman living in a post-invasion Shiite Iraq is going to be better off than a woman living in Saddam's secularist society where she could get an education and was not compelled to go about dressed in a bag?

We are told that it is not good enough to simply say that "George Bush is a dangerous, religious-driven idiot who represents all that is rotten about America". But what if it is true?

Before the rhetorical question is dismissed as anti-Americanism, consider this, written by an American patriot: "George Bush is an ignorant, cruel, closed-minded, avaricious, sneaky, irresponsible, thieving, brain-damaged frat boy with a drinking problem and a taste for bloodshed, whose numerous crimes have been abetted by the moral corruption of his party cohort and whose contempt for American military lives alone warrants his impeachment..." (Harpers, June 2006, p10)

When it comes to calling Bush a dangerous idiot, no one does it with more fervour and with the benefit of a close-up view and the protection of the First Amendment than his fellow Americans.

To admit now that there were no weapons and no links to al-Qaeda but to argue that we went to war to liberate Iraqi women is grotesque.

If Iraq ever recovers from the post-invasion chaos, it will be as a Shiite theocracy and we all know what that means for women.

Women - politically docile women - might well have been the one section of Iraq society clearly better off with Saddam running the country.

Would either George the Smaller or his Man of Steel feel comfortable being praised for having liberated Iraq for same-sex marriages and collective bargaining? If they would, why didn't they mention it right at the outset?

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