Judgement at Concordia

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Last night I attended a National Book Award event at a local college, featuring John Dower, a Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author who has written Cultures of War, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq. He discussed the parallels in "shock and awe" tactics and the strategic imbecility of having no backup plan...after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, after America invaded Iraq.

Dower commented that one of the greatest tragedies of the failure to hold hearings or any kind of "conversation" much less trials about Iraq is that the complete record is likely lost to history. Unlike the record we have from Nuremberg and Tokyo.

Instead we have Rumsfeldian revisionism that will only get worse, I'm thinking. No wonder Dubya mocked the historians. Although, even with the limited record of leakers and piecing together what was on the record yet willfully ignored by the groupthink of the men who made these decisions with Mad Mary hovering over them [I will never get that iconic picture scrubbed from my brain!], judgements are being made. And Dubya's not dead yet.

Invading Iraq -- one of the most colossal failures in strategic thinking in global and military history.

The pullers of the levers of power may want to deny it, to cover it up, to leave it in the dustbin, to not contemplate their own culpability. The media may go along because their own colossal failure to do their jobs, instead, to enable, to steno the run-up to war would be revealed, as well. The incestuous little village may want to keep its tidy little salons free of such petty annoyances as accountability. Starting with looking at their own bare faces in the mirror. And thus, the lesson of history could be lost to future generations

Heckuva job, Bushie.

Unless.

Unless there are men and women of honor and courage and a sense of history as well as right and wrong who will one by one come forward and place their testimony, their documents, on the record.

Failing that, this truly will be a failure of "intelligence."
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crossposted at firedoglake/MyFDL