Iraq truth endangers patriots

Those of us - Australian, British, American, Japanese, Estonian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Polish, Mongolian, whoever - who did our patriotic duty by offering good solid practical advise, wise counsel and constructive criticism when it became so tragically obvious that U.S. President George Bush and his clique did not have either the courage or the ability to defeat the terrorists and to pacify the insurgents should all rejoice now that the United States bipartisan Iraq Study Group Report has forced those in power to put their dangerous fantasies aside for the moment take a glance at the stark realities of what is really happening in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group Report shows a way forward that is an alternative to the whims and delusions of individual politicians.

There should be gratitude for those patriots who sounded the alarms and shouted the warnings ..... but the reality is that, in Australia and in the United States at least, there won't be. (The British, despite their loss of so many traditional liberties under Thatcher and because of the IRA and Islamist bombings, are still relatively tolerant of dissent).

Instead, the governments and their fanatical supporters in both countries will crack down on all those who tried to prevent or to alleviate the effects of the tragic series of follies, errors and blunders that got us into this mess.

They will never never never accept responsibility for their failures, their mistakes, their ignorance and their neglect .... but they will try to shift the blame elsewhere; it's always been the nature of such people to do so.

For instance, at the end of the First World War, those who went on to form the Nazi regime refused to accept the reality that their Kaiser Wilhelm II was incompetent, meddling and a bit loopy. They preferred the comfortable excuse of the "Stab In The Back" even though the German Army (and the KuK Austro-Hungarian Army too) was full of both Socialists and Jews who were dying in battle for their Fatherland whereas the advocates of peace actually came from right among their own social circle. They turned, with blind ferocity, on the Jews and the Socialists rather than face up to unpleasant reality and do anything practical to recover quickly from the effects of defeat and to get better results from the Versailles Peace Conference.

So hang on and get ready for deluge of lies, abuse, vilification, attacks, blame-shifting, misrepresentation and excuses from the greedy, the wilfully ignorant, the "arcade-game soldiers" and the incompetent who got us into Iraq and then "snatched defeat from the jaws of victory".

http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-12-8-voa33.cfm