Question War - If you don't, who will?

I hope I was one of the “political activists ranting against the war in Iraq” mentioned by the AGN in their surprising story about local bloggers. A good rant is a thing of beauty – check out any of Mark Morford's columns in the San Francisco Chronicle for the pinnacle of the genre. I don't claim that for mine – I was simply letting my anger express itself coolly, while at the same time pointing readers to where they could incite their own anger a bit.

And speaking of good rants against Bush's war, did you read Brit MP George Galloway's opening statement in his testimony before the Senate committee (four senators showed up; only two, Coleman and Levin, stayed to the end) that accused him of profiting from Saddam’s oil-for-food scams? Talk about truth to power. He smoked them with indictments like this:

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

How I would love to hear someone from our compliant, complicit Congress speak like that.

The lies that hoodwinked us into this war are popping up like corpses in the Tigris. Again, from the British, whose civil servants aren't afraid to blow the whistle and who have newspapers that don't back down, there's the Downing Street Memo. This should send Bush and every imperial neocon chickhawk criminal who plotted and executed this war to jail. Problem: it took major US papers two weeks to 'find' the story and then bury it deep in their news sections, instead of leading with a headline like 'Bush Planned War Early, Schemed To “Fix” Intelligence And Facts'.

Inhale deeply the smoke from this gun and talk it up all you can. Imbibe Mark Danner's “Secret Way To War” that lays out the sordid plot. Absorb William River Pitt's “Criminals Belong In Prison”, who provides the evidence for the only resolution that will redeem our country - “get George W. Bush out of the White House and into a cellblock in The Hague”.