Practiced testimony

The GOP establishment should look on the bright side. All of these allegations and indictments -- against Abramoff and DeLay, with more on the way for such luminaries as "Scooter" (worst nickname for an inmate) Libby, Rove, and Reed expecting to be served any day -- well, they're just good practice for the ultimate trial that bobs up and down on the waves of the future. The war crimes tribunals.

I just heard Secretary of State Condi Rice give the most concise defense of the invasion of Iraq on Meet the Press I've heard to date. Clearly, the Administration's argument has become less nebulous in a way I've been hoping it would, if only so I can make my argument against it more concise.

Condi argued that after 9/11 we had two choices: we could go after and eradicate bin Laden and Al Qaida and then turn toward protecting ourselves against other threats, or we could go after the roots of Islamic terrorism and change the landscape in the Middle East. She argued that no one who understands the Middle East could imagine the landscape there changing until Saddam Hussein was out of power.

First let me say that this is the very first defense of the invasion that rings true to me, so I give the Secretary high marks for being so direct and succinct about it. However, this is what I suspected all along was our motivation and only strengthens my opposition to the decision. Essentially this boils down to saying that because we need the Middle East to evolve, we're willing to bomb totally innocent civilians to do it. In other words, it's OK to kill innocent Iraqis to try and protect ourselves.

Just as the poor of this country were an abstraction to the Cheney administration until bodies were seen floating in the streets of New Orleans (and have morphed back into an abstraction, quickly enough), so were the people of Iraq just an abstraction in the bigger picture of "reshaping" the middle east, never more so than now, when body counts of "insurgents" have once again grown popular with the Pentagon.

I am not the first to say this, but once this shameful administration is at long last out of office, don't expect George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld to do much traveling outside the United States.