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the case for war was obviously false from the outset.
that it got congressional approval is obviously problematic, but congress did not originate the plan, nor did it fabricate "evidence" to support the plan, nor did it squander its personal credibility in selling the plan. the bush people did that.
the primary condition of possibility for the selling of the iraq debacle was the climate of barely controlled hysteria (of which the administration's policies were a part, that they presupposed) following 9/11/2001--a hysteria that was in many ways unforgivable in that it represented a wholesale breakdown of any semblance of internal checks on ideological propositions, a wholesale abdication of journalistic responsibility on the part of the american press. the problem of press credibility this period generated could explain some of why the press seems now to have acquired something of a critical distance from the policies of bushworld: the press has its own legitimacy problem to manage, and the bush administration is to a very significant degree the source of that.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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