Children’s Crusade

Maureen Dowd has an unusually good column up in which she reports something I hadn’t heard before:

In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism.

Can you believe that crap? I realize that we are always calling things “Orwellian” but actually dubbing Afghanistan and Iraq as the Global War On Terrorism makes the slightly Nazi-esque term Homeland Security sound a little bit delicate.

More importantly, this is another one of those never-never land dipshit political moves that piles one disasaterous decision on top of another. In honor of Karen Hughes, we’ll call them Catastrophies With Consequences.

Dowd continues:

The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the world.

That initial deception — and headlong rush to throw off international conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross — led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.

Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a “terrorist”; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or “humanitarian do-gooders,” to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe, a Republican.

One of my arguments against the invasion was the entirely predicatable blowback. It seemed to me that after 9/11 and the whole worldwide Jihad thing that we should be a little bit more cunning and wily and a little less full of shit.

I could never see the logic in unnecessarily opening this Iraq front, particularly when it was obvious that it was going to make matters worse without any discernible benefit. We had enemies enough already and smarter and simpler ways to combat terrorism than crashing around the mid-east like an uncontrolled, enraged beast.

And it doesn’t take a Phd from the University of Chicago to realize that when you go around making things up— like we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq “because of terrorism” — there might be some glitches in the president’s crusade for peace, love and understanding. Politicians should remember that children are listening. And I’m talking about fully grown Americans who may be confused by the president’s clear message that we invaded Iraq to liberate a bunch of terrorists.