Silent No More

Is anyone else having flashbacks to fall 2002?

Back then, I was reading everything I could dig up about the war in Afghanistan and the inspectors in Iraq. I read articles by former diplomats and Pentagon employees with expertise in Middle East affairs, like General Anthony Zinni, and reports in British and European newspapers to get another perspective on events. I took to turning off network news within 10 minutes after turning it on and perusing online publications.

I also began to seek out nonpartisan media and political monitoring sites like Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (fair.org) and Factcheck.org. I was desperate to learn the facts as I watched the administration in Washington bang the drum to attack Iraq.

My reading led me to conclude two things. First, no tie had ever existed between Saddam Hussein and Al-Quaida. Second, a power shift was taking place within the Pentagon. Old guard professionals with a real world view of Mid-East affairs were being systematically purged to make way for a cabal of neo-cons tied to the Project for a New American Century. Even I could see, from my PC in Southwest Iowa, that intelligence reports were being massaged to reflect the agenda of the neo-cons.

Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the inspection team were gathering information from the ground and finding nothing that was a threat to the U.S.

When Congress voted on the authorization to use force in Iraq, I was flabbergasted. If I could obtain and analyze information from my front room, why couldn’t federal lawmakers? Could they really be so shallow as to cast their vote simply on political expediency? This authorization was essentially a vote for military action, which meant lives would be lost – including civilians.

I had arguments with my son and husband who wanted to believe our president and Congress had inside information. Like so many Americans, they wanted to trust our leadership. But the facts were against them.

I watched in horror that night the following March when the bombs began to drop in Baghdad. I have personal ties to that country as my brother-in-law’s family fled from Iraq in 1948. I also went to graduate school with an Iraqi woman. So to me, this was not an abstract military action. This was the destruction of people’s lives and homes – for no good reason!

Today, I’m watching our president run through similar rhetoric about Iran. And again I’m seeing reports from the IAEA contradicting the president’s views about Iran’s nuclear capabilities. In addition, reports of the current Iranian leader’s support among Iranians are mixed, and their economy is not stable.

Yet as soon as Secretary of Defense Gates and Secretary of State Rice begin U.S. efforts to engage in diplomacy, something changes Bush’s mind, and he starts to bang the war drum again. Reports of plans for air strikes in Iran have been circulating for the last year thanks to the dogged reporting of Seymour Hersh and the insider’s perspective of former inspector Scott Ritter.

But the final pieces fell into place for me recently. The first piece was the report of the B-52 carrying armed nuclear warheads to an air base in Barksdale, La. As reported on the blog site, TPMCafe, by Larry Johnson (http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/sep/05/staging_nuke_for_iran), that base is a jumping off point for Mid-East operations. The second piece was Sydney Blumenthal’s article “Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction” in Salon Magazine on Sept. 6, 2007 and also posted on Common Dreams. Bush knew the facts, but he refused to acknowledge them.

We’ve come full circle.

I read the signs right last time, and I didn’t speak up. I thought, “How can I, a single average individual from rural America, change anything?”

This time, I won’t be silent.