Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, author of the infamous "Axis of Evil" claim in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, has a Newsweek column this morning announcing that "all of us who advocated for the [Iraq] war have had to do some reckoning". His column is an attempt to provide such a reckoning, and contains numerous revealing assertions.
He begins with this melodramatic decree, designed to make you sympathetic of the stressful and scary environment in which Bush officials were operating: "My youngest daughter was born in December 2001: a war baby." To justify this characterization, he says that "when my wife nursed little Beatrice in the middle of the night, she'd hear F-16s patrolling the Washington skies," and that "a few weeks before, a sniper had terrorized the Washington suburbs. Anthrax attacks had killed five people and infected 17 others. What would come next?" (In actuality, the anthrax attacks came from a US Army lab; the Washington sniper attacks were in 2002, not 2001, and were perpetrated by two Americans; and hearing some F-16s patrolling the sky is hardly the stuff of extreme war trauma, particularly when compared to what people in actual war zones regularly experience). Frum is right that the fear levels were extremely high in this time period, but that was due to a deliberate campaign orchestrated by the administration in which he served.
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"...do some reckoning."? Reckoning? RECKONING??? He should be on his knees after crawling from his house to Arlington Cemetary (or to Walter Reed Hospital) so he could give a speech outlining his abject sorrow for the young lives lost and all the others who will live their lives in wheelchairs and without arms, legs, and eyesight. Then he should demand that all the makers of the weapons, bombs, and bullets that grew so rich off his and his friends LIES send EVERYTHING they own to a central fund for distribution to those families. Then BEG the American people to make the President DECLARE WAR (not start another "conflict") the next time we want to enrich General Dynamics, Boeing, Haliburton, and the others who love war so much. And make them send at least one member of every one of their families and one member of every Congressman's family to the FRONT LINE of the next war. How many wars do you think we would be fighting THEN??
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