Remember Tommy Flanagan? He was the pathological liar from Saturday Night Live, played by Jon Lovitz. Incapable of telling the truth, Tommy’s lies would grow, in an externalized interior monologue, punctuated with drawn out “yeaaaah”s and finished up with a “That’s the ticket!” Caught in a lie, Tommy would make the lie bigger and more outlandish, until it was so far-fetched and so unprovable that… well… could it be true?
I think our president and his cronies have quite a bit of Tommy Flanagan in them. First we were going to go after Iraq because it was part of the “Axis of Evil” and a state sponsor of terrorism. Then it was because Saddam Hussein’s government was in cahoots with al-Qaeda. Then it was because the Taliban and al-Qaeda members who’d escaped our half-hearted attempts to capture them in Afghanistan had made it over the border and were hiding out in Iraq. Then it was because they had weapons of mass destruction which they were planning on unleashing against their neighbors or us. Then it was because we had to protect the Kurdish minority in the North who were in the process of building a democratic state. Then it was because they were helping to fund the Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah in their suicide bombing campaigns against Israel. Then it was because they had been buying fissionable nuclear material from the Russian black market. Then it was because they’d been trying to buy aluminum tubes which are necessary in the centrifuging process for creating fissionable material.
Then… yeah… that’s the ticket: We’re going after Iraq because they’ve failed to heed the UN Security Council resolutions for the past 12 years. Suddenly, we had a reason which the rest of the world could support. Now the Bushies could go into their long-planned war with the world’s backing. After all, if Saddam could keep thumbing its nose at the UN, then perhaps the UN had become meaningless. You could see Perle and Wolfowitz and Rummy and Cheney all rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of imminent war. And best of all, if the UN decided to pass a new resolution against Iraq, the Imperial Boy President could ignore the niceties of Congressional approval because this was a continuation of a war which had never ended. A nice little war, no pesky Congressional inquiries, and yet another issue to keep Halliburton, Harken, Enron and the economy off the front pages. A Trifecta!
So, when Iraq announced in a letter to UN Secretary-General Koffi Annan that they would unconditionally accept the return of weapons inspectors, the Hawks were angry. “You can’t trust the Iraqis,” they said. “It’s another ploy,” they said. You could see them scrambling, and then… “This is not a matter of inspections. It is about disarmament…” So… until the weapons are destroyed, we’re going ahead with our plans for war! Yeah… that’s the ticket!
