'Downing Memos' shed light on run-up to Iraq war (registration required)
Blair's own Labour Party - indeed, the world at large - still needed to be convinced as to why the threat from Saddam Hussein had suddenly become dire, why an invasion wouldn't contravene international law, and what kind of government might replace Saddam's regime.I believe that was exactly the question I asked *after* we invaded. The exact phrase I used was "crime of aggression".
I'm frustrated to death about this. I never thought we had any business starting this war, and now that people are calling for a timetable to pull out our troops instead of specifying what conditions need to be met in order to pull them out... Well, it's maddening that we haven't already defined what those conditions should be, actually. I have no idea anymore if we need to stay the course, or getting the hell out would make it better for those people. Every time I think of it, my mind just freezes up trying to think of what might fix such a cluster f*ck.
Knowing this, and knowing that these memos are out there, it makes it all worse. If our government is planning wars that should never happen, if they're pretending to wage them to protect us, if the UN Sanctions are not obtained, and plans are pushed through against the better judgement of the rest of the world, how can we say that we're not committing gigantic acts of terrorism ourselves?
And now you read everywhere about the possibility of war with Iran, of war with Syria. With whose soldiers, I ask you, whose money? War is expensive, it costs money and lives and neither is a commodity we can afford to part with. This warhawk attitude has to stop. I was hoping we had evolved past this kind of behavior and I'm unimaginably sad that I was wrong.
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