1 Boring Old Man

Back during the period when Bush started talking about Iraq, I was still working. Another thing that was happening was that the Class of 60, Best in Dixie, my high school class, was discovering the Internet. We began nostalgizing and, of course, sending around jokes. One classmate, a retired Navy guy, sent lots of those patriotic things, the ones with corny sayings and wavy flags. One day, he sent us all a joke. It was a picture of an automobile driving off of an aircraft carrier into the sea with some caption I can’t recall, something like "an Iraqi sendoff." That wasn’t it, but that was the sentiment. Another classmate, a Viet Nam War pilot, turned whistle blower and anti-nuclear activist took offense, and sent back a very serious email opposed to what Bush seemed to be proposing. I weighed in, suggesting our class debate this looming idea of invading Iraq. So the email started flying. Some joked as we had done in those Wonder Years before the sixties became "the sixties." Many were in the Patriotic, post-911 mode. I finally concluded that I didn’t buy it, the danger of Iraq, and questioned Bush’s motives. I got blasted by a few. One sent a treatise, "The Biblical Case for War" from some Internet Evangelist and said, "I’d rather have a president who gets on his knees every morning to pray than one with his shorts around his ankles!" Some agreed with me. But mostly, it was too hot to discuss and the communication whithered. But it helped me get in touch with how much I didn’t believe in what my morning paper and evening news was telling me.

My reason for bringing this up is that I remember being massively confused about "why?" I didn’t buy the "greed for oil" idea very much. I wondered if it had something to do with "revenge" for Bush’s father, or some attempt to "trump" his father. I looked up what Cheney had said after the Gulf War. At the time, he seemed to agree that stopping after the liberation of Kuwait was the right thing. But I had no information to go on, and stayed confused about "why?" though I knew what I thought about the War in Iraq that was coming, I absolutely hated the idea. And even though I like[ed] Colin Powell, I couldn’t make sense of his U.N. presentation – it all sounded like innuendo instead of intelligence. At the time, I wished we had real intelligence, either way.

So, about Hubris: It’s hard for me to read. I’m reading about the lead up to the war, and remembering what I [and my former classmates] were thinking at the time. And I’m having a lot of cognitive dissonance. So, I’d suggest a slow read. This story is about a history that we’ve all lived, told by non-right wing but well sourced-authors. My suggestion for a slow read is based on my experience that what I’m reading now, what I’ve read and surmised in the interim, and what we were told then are so out of sync, that it takes some digesting to metabolize it all. The only for-sure thing I’ve concluded so far [besides the obvious, our leaders are liars, but I already knew that] is that my recent thoughts that Bush was sort of a puppet in this story are wrong. He was right square in the middle of everything that was happening. He really seems to have been "the decider" he claims to be…