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'The Truth Will Emerge'
by SENATOR ROBERT C. BYRD


Senate Floor Remarks - May 21, 2003

"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,--
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers."

Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it.
Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths we
humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of
squeezing out through the cracks, eventually. But the danger is that at some
point it may no longer matter. The danger is that damage is done before the
truth is widely realized. The reality is that, sometimes, it is easier to
ignore uncomfortable facts and go along with whatever distortion is
currently in vogue.

We see a lot of this today in politics. I see a lot of it--more than I would
ever have believed--right on this Senate floor. Regarding the situation in
Iraq, it appears to this senator that the American people may have been
lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in
violation of longstanding International law, under false premises. There is
ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully
manipulated to switch public focus from Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who
masterminded the September 11 attacks, to Saddam Hussein, who did not. The
run-up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his
Cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom
clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver
germ-laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of
overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein's direct threat to our freedoms. The
tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still
suffering from a combination of post-traumatic stress and justifiable anger
after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo
for the anger.

Since the war's end, every subsequent revelation that has seemed to refute
the previous dire claims of the Bush Administration has been brushed aside.
Instead of addressing the contradictory evidence, the White House deftly
changes the subject. No weapons of mass destruction have yet turned up, but
we are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet will. But our costly
and destructive bunker-busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven, in the
main, precisely the opposite of what we were told was the urgent reason to
go in. It seems also to have, for the present, verified the assertions of
Hans Blix and the inspection team he led, which President Bush and company
so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of time will be needed to find such
weapons, if they do indeed exist. Meanwhile, bin Laden is still on the loose
and Saddam Hussein has come up missing. The Administration assured the US
public and the world, over and over again, that an attack was necessary to
protect our people and the world from terrorism. It assiduously worked to
alarm the public and blur the faces of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
until they virtually became one.

What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq was no
immediate threat to the United States. Ravaged by years of sanctions, Iraq
did not even lift an airplane against us. Iraq's threatening, death-dealing
fleet of unmanned drones about which we heard so much morphed into one
prototype made of plywood and string. Their missiles proved to be outdated
and of limited range. Their army was quickly overwhelmed by our technology
and our well-trained troops. Presently our loyal military personnel continue
their mission of diligently searching for WMDs. They have so far turned up
only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons and the occasional
buried swimming pool. They are misused on such a mission, and they continue
to be at grave risk. But the Bush team's extensive hype of WMDs in Iraq as
justification for a pre-emptive invasion has become more than embarrassing.
It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of
power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraqi
civilians killed and maimed when war was not really necessary? Was the
American public deliberately misled? Was the world?

What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are
"liberators." The facts don't seem to support the label we have so
euphemistically attached to ourselves. True, we have unseated a brutal,
despicable despot, but "liberation" implies the follow-up of freedom,
self-determination and a better life for the common people. In fact, if the
situation in Iraq is the result of liberation, we may have set the cause of
freedom back 200 years. Despite our high-blown claims of a better life for
the Iraqi people, water is scarce and often foul, electricity is a sometime
thing, food is in short supply, hospitals are stacked with the wounded and
maimed, historic treasures of the region and of the Iraqi people have been
looted, and nuclear material may have been disseminated to heaven knows
where, while US troops, on orders, looked on and guarded the oil supply.
Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and
refurbish its oil industry are awarded to Administration cronies, without
benefit of competitive bidding, and the United States steadfastly resists
offers of UN assistance to participate. Is there any wonder that the real
motives of the US government are the subject of worldwide speculation and
mistrust?

And in what may be the most damaging development, the United States appears
to be pushing off Iraq's clamor for self-government. Jay Garner has been
summarily replaced, and it is becoming all too clear that the smiling face
of the United States as liberator is quickly assuming the scowl of an
occupier. The image of the boot on the throat has replaced the beckoning
hand of freedom. Chaos and rioting only exacerbate that image, as US
soldiers try to sustain order in a land ravaged by poverty and disease.
"Regime change" in Iraq has so far meant anarchy, curbed only by an
occupying military force and a US administrative presence that is evasive
about if and when it intends to depart. Democracy and freedom cannot be
force-fed at the point of an occupier's gun. To think otherwise is folly.

One has to stop and ponder. How could we have been so impossibly naïve? How
could we expect to easily plant a clone of US culture, values and government
in a country so riven with religious, territorial and tribal rivalries, so
suspicious of US motives and so at odds with the galloping materialism that
drives the Western-style economies? As so many warned this Administration
before it launched its misguided war on Iraq, there is evidence that our
crackdown thereis likely to convince 1,000 new bin Ladens to plan other
horrors of the type we have seen in the past several days. Instead of
damaging the terrorists, we have given them new fuel for their fury. We did
not complete our mission in Afghanistan because we were so eager to attack
Iraq. Now it appears that Al Qaeda is back with a vengeance. We have
returned to orange alert in the United States, and we may well have
destabilized the Mideast region, a region we have never fully understood.

We have alienated friends around the globe with our dissembling and our
haughty insistence on punishing former friends who may not see things quite
our way. The path of diplomacy and reason have gone out the window, to be
replaced by force, unilateralism and punishment for transgressions. I read
most recently with amazement our harsh castigation of Turkey, our longtime
friend and strategic ally. It is astonishing that our government is berating
the new Turkish government for conducting its affairs in accordance with its
own Constitution and its democratic institutions. Indeed, we may have
sparked a new international arms race as countries move ahead to develop
WMDs as a last-ditch attempt to ward off a possible pre-emptive strike from
a newly belligerent United States, which claims the right to hit where it
wants.

In fact, there is little to constrain this President. Congress, in what will
go down in history as its most unfortunate act, handed away its power to
declare war for the foreseeable future and empowered this President to wage
war at will. As if that were not bad enough, members of Congress are
reluctant to ask questions that are begging to be asked. How long will we
occupy Iraq? We have already heard disputes on the number of troops that
will be needed to retain order. What is the truth? How costly will the
occupation and rebuilding be? No one has given a straight answer. How will
we afford this long-term, massive commitment, fight terrorism at home,
address a serious crisis in domestic healthcare, afford behemoth military
spending and give away billions in tax cuts amid a deficit that has climbed
to more than $340 billion for this year alone? If the President's tax cut
passes it will be $400 billion. We cower in the shadows while false
statements proliferate. We accept soft answers and shaky explanations
because to demand the truth is hard, or unpopular, or may be politically
costly.

But I contend that through it all, the people know. The American people
unfortunately are used to political shading, spin and the usual chicanery
they hear from public officials. They patiently tolerate it up to a point.
But there is a line. It may seem to be drawn in invisible ink for a time,
but eventually it will appear in dark colors, tinged with anger. When it
comes to shedding American blood--when it comes to wreaking havoc on
civilians, on innocent men, women and children, callous dissembling is not
acceptable. Nothing is worth that kind of lie--not oil, not revenge, not
re-election, not somebody's grand pipe dream of a democratic domino theory.
And mark my words, the calculated intimidation that we see so often of late
by the "powers that be" will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for just
so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And
when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"Truth has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it.
Distortion only serves to derail it for a time. No matter to what lengths we
humans may go to obfuscate facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of
squeezing out through the cracks, eventually." -- Sen. Robert Byrd --
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030609&s=byrd