Any more.
Are we going to swallow this one too?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Friday it would consider military action in Iraq a success even if U.S. forces failed to find President Saddam Hussein, whose appearance on Iraqi television could prove he survived a U.S. bombing raid on the first night of the war.Or this, from the Washington Post:
One marker [of victory in Iraq] explicitly rejected by the White House is the capture or confirmed death of Hussein. The administration does not want its ambitious postwar plans to be held hostage by a search for the Iraqi leader. Opinion polls have suggested that a public perception of success would be reduced if Hussein's whereabouts remain unknown.During early preparations for war, one official said, some U.S. thinkers "operated on the assumption that it was going to be a relatively clean break, that the end of the regime would be clear for all to see. That may not be the case. I think we're seeing a rolling end."
For the past two and a half years, since planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, virtually everything this junta has done at home and around the world it alleges to have done in the name of destroying, first, Osama Bin Laden, and then, when he escaped our might, his alleged buddy and co-conspirator, Saddam Hussein, who now may also have escaped. But we definitely never hear about Bin Laden any more, and as of today Hussein has apparently also been relegated to the dustpin. Their usefullness to the grander political purposes of our occupiers in Washington is finished, but new monsters are already being manufactured in Washington and we will be hearing about them soon.
We can at least try to remember that by their accusations about the authors of September 11, the Bushies have failed in the assignment they announced they had set for themselves and for which they gambled, and lost, the world.
The incredibly embarassing admission that it has abandoned its quest for accountability and revenge may serve at least one positive purpose for the administration: Any talk of, or actual moves toward, holding Saddam and his regime accountable far war crimes could not help but provoke discussion of the war crimes of the American and British governments themselves.