Niranjan Ramakrishnan, writing at Counterpunch, reminds us of a very disturbing reality: the fact that many of us hope that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will finally be the one to finally convince all Americans that the Bush administration lied its way into the Iraq war and that he will tell us all exactly how it happened.
Despite the fact that most Americans are now opposed to the war and President Bush, many still choose not to hold the Bush administration fully accountable for what it has done. If they did, they would be screaming for their representatives to impeach Bush and Cheney for what they’ve perpetuated: the destruction of Iraq and the deaths and injuries of countless soldiers and civilians – all based on lies.
We see it in congresspeople on both sides who, as Meteor Blades reminds us, still call the war a “mistake”. As he tells us: this was not a mistake, this was a deliberate deception by power-hungry warmongers. Surely there can be no greater outrage than knowing that your country’s leaders have sent its sons and daughters to die over lies.
Yet, here we are on the eve of possible indictments in the Plame affair, after more than 2000 US soldiers have perished in Iraq and the people’s best hope for getting to the bottom of the trail of deceit that led there is one lone prosecutor – Patrick Fitzgerald – because those in power and those in the opposition cannot rock the foundations of the administration hard enough to move them out of DC permanently.
As Counterpunch’s Ramakrishnan, concludes:
So why is this riveting the country’s attention? Because the story follows the familiar theme so beloved of Hollywood and John Grisham — the lone hero struggling against a sinister web of evil, where everything comes down to one last battle on the edge of the cliff . Now playing at a TV set near you: Fitzgerald Against the Machine.
But when institutions have been hollowed out, consigning checks on unbridled power to hopes of individual heroism and goodness, we have doubly arrived, to the promised land of the Reagan revolution, and at the doorstep of the third world.
There is something very broken about a system of government that is unable and unwilling to thoroughly account for how it got itself into an illegal war and that refuses to inform its people and the rest of the world about how it will finally get out.
