It started early this week as I expected it would. The chorus from the right, those Heritage Foundation types cautioning us on C-SPAN and elsewhere not to look back on the causes of the Iraq disaster, blame nobody, swallow hard, and look ahead to new solutions, whatever they may be. But don't look back to the origins of this war. It was as if we were Lot's wife, warned by God's angels not to look back on Sodom, else this whole country turn into a pillar of salt. As soon as the Iraq Study Group report came in with its knuckle rapping of the President and his advisers for their conduct of the war, with not a word about the President's past criminal acts; putting the nation at risk by starting this war with lies, arrogance, slogans, and fantastic hubris, one would have thought the right would have been placated. Here was the report reducing the whole Iraq business to a corporate management problem, a cost benefit analysis, just a very bad year for Wal-Mart. But even that didn't satisfy some of the committed. Connecticut's Senator Joseph Lieberman, disagreed with the report. "No Go Joe" would have none of it, attempting to provide more cover for his buddy Bush to continue with the war. John McCain offered more of his pour on the troops solution, a hideous premonition of what a President McCain would offer us. It was as if you could only justify the death of thousands by putting thousands more at risk. While nearly everyone else hopes that this report provides sufficient cover for both Democrats and Republicans to make the necessary retreat from Iraq as soon as possible, one glaring fact is ignored: without looking back we can't move forward. We are stuck with this President, mired in a never ending catastrophe of his making, for which he remains unaccountable.
Here's what I see when I look back. The admirable James A. Baker III helping to rig the 2000 election results for George W. Bush in Florida. The incorruptible "Swing vote Sandy" Day O'Connor perverting the power of the Supreme Court with an act of egregious political preference that placed George W. Bush in the Presidency. And these are the most principled experts we could come up with to save us from Bush's catastrophic errors? They may now condemn the policies of the Bush administration, being faced by the dire results of his acts, and theirs, but it is far too little and much too late. Unless the man himself, George W. Bush, is forced to be held accountable for this war, little will change in the next two years. Does anyone expect Bush &Company to alter their course unless forced to do so by the Congress and the country? This report will mean little to him, and he will continue to take us from one disaster to another, unless there is a meaningful condemnation of George W. Bush's presidency, and that's called impeachment. If we don't look back now we do risk becoming that pillar of salt.