Less than nine months after fundamentalist religious zealots inflicted mass casualties on the civilian population of the United States, and only about six months after the U.S. toppled the regime that harbored them, a country of no consequence or relevance to the safety of the United States--a country hated by the fundamentalist religious zealots for its secular ideology and its Western treatment of women, a country with a devastated economy and crippled military, a country that the U.S. and Britain regularly bombed (since it didn't even have sovereign control over all its own territory), a nation half of whose population were children, a country which the US outspent on military might 400 to 1--this country was suddenly declared the most pressing threat to the U.S. and world peace.
In an American version of Ionesco's Rhinoceros--the brilliant, "theater of the absurd" rendering of the mass insanity that beset Germany in the 1930s--the American population was progressively whipped in to war frenzy through a series of lies, more or less brazen, to the point that, while no one in their right mind in the summer of 2001 would have described Iraq as a security threat to the U.S., by the late fall of 2002, a large portion of the U.S. population actually believed that. (It's worth noting that the lies, and the cover-up that followed them, were heavily abetted by the blogosphere, despite its self-important, but simply self-serving, claims to be a force for accuracy in news coverage.)
Despite the breathtaking propaganda campaign--the most frightening in the United States during my lifetime--significant portions of the U.S. population remained opposed to the lunatic belligerence of the current Administration; they were joined, of course, by the vast majority of the world's population, though in a signal victory for democracy, their voice was ignored by numerous "democratic" governments, who quickly joined the Administration's "Coalition of the Billing."
Will it happen again? I'm hopeful it won't, but....
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