con·cept: Accessory Before the Fact to Murder

con·cept: Accessory Before the Fact:
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002

When you claim that a preemptive war is necessary because the enemy has weapons of mass destruction, the logical, indeed the only, thing to do when you've deposed that enemy, is to immediately sieze and control his ammunition dumps and weapon centers, to sieze and guard all buildings that might have information about hidden weapons, for the safety of your own forces.

When you never had plans to do so, you're either totally incompetent, or your proclaimed cause was never anything but a pretext.

I'm afraid with this administration, we have evidence that both of these are true.

They really expected a people who had a history of western occupation was going to greet them with flowers, and their actions showed that WMD, weapons of mass distruction weren't important enough to secure,
conventional weapons weren't important, order wasn't important. Oil, and only oil was important."

Failure to secure those conventional arms, in a country that virtually was an ammo dump, makes George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and others accessories before the fact to the murder of our people by improvised devices from those same weapons caches. Makes them accessories to the maiming of tens of thousands of our own, and uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis.

There is no other explanation for the extraordinary, willful refusal to do the things necessary for the troops safety. Remember, they thought they were going to pay for the war and occupation with Iraqs own oil. But, even in a best case scenario, if Iraqis had greeted us with flowers, as in the liberation of Paris, there would have still been Baathists and members of the Republican Guard who would have known were the weapons were, and would have been prepared to use them on our troops.

The only acceptable explanation for not immediately securing the caches we knew of, for not siezing the information needed to find the rest, is the knowledge that WMD weren't there, coupled with incompetence that ignored the minor threat of conventional explosives because the major threat of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons was a sham.

From Bob Herbert, October 18, 2004
A War Without Reason
There should no longer be any doubt that the war in Iraq is an exercise in lunacy. It was launched with a spurious rationale, the weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a fantasy relentlessly stoked by obsessively hawkish middle-aged men who ran and hid when they were of fighting age and the nation was at war.

Now we find that we can't win this war we started. Soldiers and civilians alike are trapped in the proverbial briar patch, unable to move around safely in a country that the warmongers thought would be easy to conquer and then rebuild.

There is no way to overstate how profoundly wrong they were.

Our troops continue to die but we can't even identify the enemy, which is why so many innocent Iraqi civilians - including women and children - are being blown away. The civilians are being killed by the thousands, even as the dreaded Saddam Hussein is receiving first-class health care (most recently a successful hernia operation) from his captors.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/opinion/18herbert.html

It Gets Worse

We now know that they didn't even guard the nuclear materials and equipment that the UN inspectors had already inventoried and sealed.

Whole buildings have disappeared, dismanteled under the watchful eye of sattelites, but not coalition troops, not American troops.

Nuclear materials from Iraq have tuned up on the black market in Holland.

Not a day goes by, without attacks that improvise their explosives from the caches we failed to guard. Brave men and women are coming home minus legs and arms, blinded and brain damaged, or in body bags, because of the gross dereliction of a self-proclaimed “War President”

It's Time to Scream Murder

By the time the nonexistent liberal “media” Bush complains about wake up, there may be mushroom clouds over America