Someone said it again today. Invading Iraq was a mistake. Every time it gets said, I grind another layer of enamel off my teeth. Nancy Pelosi says it. John Kerry says it. Mikhail Gorbachev says it. Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero says it. Even the occasional Republican says it. And recent polls indicate 55% to 59% of Americans think it.

Every one of them is wrong. Invading Iraq was no mistake. It was bloody treason. And the traitors still rule us instead of breaking rocks at Leavenworth.

They knowingly, willingly, unhesitatingly pronounced what they knew to be lies and marginalized, denigrated and smeared contrary-minded people, manipulated real evidence, concocted fake evidence, tricked an American population traumatized, fearful and furious about terrorism and sent young men and women off to a war at the tip of a bayonet named “9/11.”
A mistake is when you hammer your thumb instead of the nail. A mistake is when you choose c) instead of d) on the SAT. A mistake is when you put too much garlic in the minestrone. Invading Iraq was no damned mistake. And calling it a mistake is more than a mere slip of the tongue. It sets a precedent. Pretty soon, everybody will be saying invading Iraq was a mistake. And in 20 years, your grandkids will be studying out of textbooks that call it a mistake.

Instead of calling it what it really was. Sedition.

Over and over again for three years we’ve had our faces rubbed in the evidence. Yet, every day, someone calls this perfidious, murderous scheme a mistake. As if invading Iraq were a foreign policy mishap. Oopsy.

Stop it already. People do not commit treachery by mistake.

As we full well know, even before George W. Bush was scooted into office 5-to-4, the men he came to front for were already at work plotting their rationale for sinking deeper military and economic roots in the Middle East, petropolitics and neo-imperialist sophistry greedily intertwined. When they stepped into office, as Richard Clarke explained to us , terrorism gave them no worries. They blew off Clarke and they blew off Hart-Rudman with scarcely a fare-thee-well. Then, when they weren’t figuring out how to lower taxes on their pals and unravel the tattered social safety net, they focused – as Paul O’Neill informed us – on finding the right excuse to persuade the American people to go to war with Saddam Hussein as a prelude to going to war with some of his neighbors. In less than nine months, that excuse dropped into their laps in the form of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze crews.

From that terrible day forward, Richard Cheney and his sidekick Donald Rumsfeld and their like-minded coterie of rogues engineered the invasion. They didn’t slip the U.S. into Iraq by mistake. Like the shrewd opportunists they have shown themselves to be in the business world, they saw the chance to carry out their invasion plan and they moved every obstacle – most especially the truth – out of their way to make it happen.

When they couldn’t get the CIA to give them the intelligence that would justify their moves they exerted pressure for a change of minds. They exaggerated, reinterpreted and rejiggered intelligence assessments. For icing they concocted their own.

Larry Wilkerson merely confirms what O’Neill and Clarke previously had told us: The traitors didn’t mistakenly stumble their way into invasion pushed along by world events; they created a cabal of renegades specifically to carry out the Project for a New America Century’s plans for hegemony, first stop – Baghdad. They didn’t carefully weigh options and evaluate the pros and cons and make error in judgment, the kind of wrong choice that could happen to anyone. They studiously ignored everyone who warned them against taking the action they had decided upon years before the World Trade Centers were turned to ashes and dust.

The traitors ignored Brent Scowcroft when he wrote in August 2002, “Don’t Attack Saddam”. They ignored the Army War College when it warned of the perils of invasion and occupation in a February 2003 report, “Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, And Missions For Military Forces In A Post-Conflict Scenario”.

When their propaganda failed to measure up as a justification for expending American lives and treasure, they fabricated evidence. Aluminum tubes that experts said could in no way be used to help make nuclear weapons were turned into prima facie evidence of Saddam’s intent to do so. Documents that intelligence veterans said from the get-go were forged remained the basis for the traitors’ claims. With the straightest face he’d mustered since taking the oath of office, Dubyanocchio declared: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

If the ousted Colin Powell can be believed, they sandbagged him into publicly providing the United Nations with information the traitors knew to be false.

Senators and Congressmen were lied into granting the President authority to take military action to protect the United States from a threat that the traitors knew didn’t exist.

When the weapons inspectors under Hans Blix couldn’t find anything, but asked for more time to look, they brushed him off and began pounding Baghdad and other Iraqi targets with a display of raw power they labeled, like ad writers for some ultimate cologne, “Shock and Awe.”

Every smidgen of this betrayal of the American people was purposely calculated, even if poorly planned and frequently incompetently handled. Just as invading Iraq was no mistake, the pretense that Bush hadn’t made his mind months before the invasion was no mistake. It was a calculated ploy to suggest falsely that the President and the ideological crocodiles in the White House gave two snaps about cooperating with the international community other than to camouflage their unalterable determination to stomp Iraq, plundering it under the guise of righteous magnanimity.

Just as the war was no mistake, torturing prisoners was no mistake. It was a deliberate, premeditated policy of international outlawry and inhumanity guided by legal arguments requested and approved by the man who soon got his reward, appointment as attorney general, and carried out on the direct orders of men like General Geoffrey Miller at the “suggestion” of Don Rumsfeld and under the command George Walker Bush.

It was no mistake that the vice president’s company collected billions in no-bid contracts and that the White House attempted to cover up massive over-charges by that company.

Just as planning for invasion, the concoction of evidence, the ignoring of counter-advice, and the lying to Congress, to the United Nations and to the American people were not mistakes, the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson was no slip of the tongue, but a conscious, purposeful and deliberate act. Nor did the traitors mistakenly smear Ambassador Joe Wilson – a smear which continues today. It was the intentional plot of men fearful of having their treacherous lies exposed.  

Mistakes were definitely made. Three years ago, too many elected Democrats and too many other Americans believed the president and vice president of the United States to be honorable men. To be patriots. To have the best interests of Americans at heart. They believed them and they believed a megamedia that operated like government-owned megaphones instead of independent watch dogs. Those were gigantic mistakes.

I haven’t told you a single thing you haven’t heard dozens of times previously. And yet, every day, people who I am positive are as well or better acquainted than I with the facts I’ve outlined here say or write: “Invading Iraq was a mistake.”  

Nooooooooooo!

Our leaders betrayed us and aided our enemies. They worked overtime to silence dissident voices. They deliberately took us into war under a cloak of deceit and the outcome, so far, is tens of thousands of dead soldiers and civilians, a weakened national security, a diplomatic catastrophe, a sullied American voice, a dwindling treasury and increased terrorism, with no end in sight.

Stop calling what they did a mistake.

[Cross-posted at The Next Hurrah.]