The narrative the overwhelming majority of Americans accept is "well the Bush Admin had bad intel, oh well whoopsie-daisy". Which conveniently absolves everyone - from the president on down to regular citizens - from any responsibility for the deaths of upwards of a million men, women, and children.
I mean, we all know Bush lied about it. But the fact that no one else even wants to interrogate that narrative is proof that this is truly a bad country. We're really just gonna let someone get away with the murdering hundreds of thousands of people, huh? Even if Bush was by some miracle duped, that is still criminal negligence and he should still spend the rest of his days rotting in the Hague. But nope, all is forgiven because he gave Michelle Obama some candy and he said some vague, extremely soft criticisms of Trump.
I think Americans do have some collective guilt over supporting the invasion. Now, I could maybe give some credit to Americans if they were prosecuting war criminal charges on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, et al. But nope, not even a hint of holding them accountable. They're all going to eventually die in wealth and comfort. Meanwhile the Iraqis who died and their families will never have that peace.
TL; DR death to America
:amerikkka:
I mean, we all know Bush lied about it. But the fact that no one else even wants to interrogate that narrative is proof that this is truly a bad country.
That's the thing with Americans (maybe westerners in generally, but I'm more familiar with Americans). They think simply having "access" to the "truth" means justice has been delivered. Police body cam footage of abuse? War criminals being sentenced 6 month in jail? News reports and internal documents of xyz lying to the public? It's all out in the open, so no need to be mad anymore because The Truth(tm) has prevailed.
They live in a fairy tale where the villain gets a stern talking to and a kick in the butt by a villager, so everyone is happy and normalcy is restored.
I think Americans do have some collective guilt over supporting the invasion.
I don't know if it's controversial, but whatever. After WWII german soldiers and citizens were forced to look at footage of the holocaust and some had to look at the physical carnage. The US needs collective trauma, and not from shit like 9/11, but from looking at their own actions inflicted on the world.
They live in a fairy tale where the villain gets a stern talking to and a kick in the butt by a villager, so everyone is happy and normalcy is restored.
Unless, of course, the villain is someone who is not as white or rich and them. In that case the villain deserves to be hung, drawn and quartered for looking at a jar of jam in a store the wrong way.
If the towers were vaccinated, they wouldn't have collapsed.
Everyone in the towers was old and had pre-existing conditions (little eichman syndrome) so they had it coming.
I mean the point of American liberal politics is just a matter of having the moral high ground because you can’t give the peasants material comfort so the least you can offer is a morally superior façade to represent them.
The ultimate test of courage in their eyes is when the democrats will give an eulogy when trump will pass away in 20years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_approval_rating#Graphs
The most noticeable thing in the history of all presidential approval ratings is GWB jumped to 90% (the highest ever) on 9/11
Americans say they oppose the Republican party, but when the chips are down, that's where their loyalties lie.
Trump saying "a million people died, if you count the other side, which I do" a few days ago when talking about the Iraq war was a crazy moment for me. I don't think anyone in recent times with that much status has ever acknowledged the other side even if it was just a tangent in some braggadocios story
So weird. Like, I don't think Trump is capable of empathy but even just acknowledging the other side is better than your average American on this.
It's like if the concept of a limited hangout was a whole country.
I was not a leftist at the time of the invasion. I was also pretty young. I spent 20 minutes online looking into the case for war and just after that I knew it was all BS. It was incredibly transparent.
From what i understand the iraq war protests were the biggest anti-war protests in us history but most people don't know they happened bc the news media just didn't give them any coverage.
The media sucks but I actually wouldn’t blame them entirely, here. The issue is that the protesters were too polite. If they had really wanted to stop the war, they should have sabotaged the infrastructure powering the war in the first place. Polite protests achieve next to nothing.
Man, Kissinger has been rehabilitated. America truly is irredeemable
Yeah I would say Nixon was even worse than W. But at least there's a contingent of Americans who think Nixon actually was a criminal.
Then again, they think he's a criminal for some ticky tack Watergate reasons; not because he has the blood of many millions of innocent people on his hands.
I think Kissinger is bad again, but only cause he made an impermissible take on Ukraine.
"Kissinger shouldn't go down in American history as a beloved statesman."
Monkey paw curls
Kissinger is going down in American history as a Putler lover because he doesn't want to nuke Moscow.
Remember when Chelsea Clinton and her buddies chanted "USA" in response to anti-war protesters? Hope she gets sent to the front lines of Ukraine and says it to the Spetsnaz.
IIRC Chelsea was counter-protesting Jeremy Corbyn at a UK anti-war protest. Folks, she is a mother and an activist! Chelsea 2028!
Ghoulish gloating fascism, equally as repugnant as Trump’s nationalism
And this photograph alone is enough to start making my blood boil. I'm not really sure how to CW it, it's not graphic but it is haunting. It's pic of an Iraqi man being detained with a bag over his head, holding his son. Truly evil shit.
Edit: also, I'm trying to compile sources for describing how the entire invasion of Iraq from beginning to end was truly immoral. From the war criminal president on down to the war criminal troops. Obviously there's the Blowback podcast but any other sources you all have are appreciated. When people ask why I'm not "supporting the troops" or whatever I'd like to eventually be able to answer just by talking about the Iraq invasion and not even getting into Korea, Vietnam, etc.
When people ask why I'm not "supporting the troops" or whatever I'd like to eventually be able to answer just by talking about the Iraq invasion and not even getting into Korea, Vietnam, etc.
You can do this already. Just based on what you know I’m sure. You could move it even closer to Syria. Every war America is involved is fucked and kills millions of people for no good reason. The military is built to steal resources and labor and then kill you and destroy your government if you don’t let them do either of those two things.
Yeah but Americans just slip into "well then you should blame the government but not the troops" mode. Fuck yes, I blame the troops too.
Cognitive Dissonance. Can’t really reason or convince your way out of that line of thinking.
I hate :reddit-logo: Indonesia libs, they claim the PKI ( communist party) were not uwu innocent like the western media claimed(what kind of fucking media they were consuming?) That the PKI deserve some blame for the violence because apparently PKI killed 9 generals, like that somehow justifies the rape, torture, and murder of 1 million Indonesians. Meanwhile the cops they love to bootlick just killed more than 100 people by tear gassing a stadium, but its okay because hahahaha Indonesian people idiots that deserve to die unlike our :reddit-logo: le rationality ass!
I've heard anecdotally that in Iraq, the image of an M9 pistol is synonymous with summary execution
I'm not sure rehabilitated is the right word, maybe absolved is better. The liberals forgave him his sins because he gave Michelle Obama candy. If you were to ask most people who the worse president of their lifetime was, I think most would answer Trump which is wild given how comparatively little war crimes he committed relative to Bush.
Does Bush do anything publicly anymore, other than the civility shit when some ghoul dies? I have to imagine if he did some speaking event he'd get a tonne of braindead boomers waiting in line to get their Alan Jackson album signed or some shit, but wouldn't literally everybody else show up and just tell the guy to fuck off? And like what is the opposition going to say? He was good for America buy letting 3000 people die and then entering a 20 year occupation that killed 5mil+? There isn't even the capitalist arguments of, the market went up, because shit colllllapsed in 2007/8/9.
Junior has zero contingent of supporters. Trump was even dunking on him about 1million Iraqi civilians getting genocided.
There should really be an overt effort to teach the kids in high school how much of a scum fuck Bush is. A simple assignment, like: Pick the worse president of your lifetime and explain why they were terrible. Frame it differently to appeal to American exceptionalism blah blah blah.
Pick the president during your lifetime that least represented American values.
Then make anybody that says Obama, Trump or Biden take an F until they watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark_Side.
Just look at who is president. The guy who was part of the war propaganda in his position as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee. And his main advisor is now his SoS.
Yeah Biden can't even pretend that all he did was vote for it like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Dude was actively and aggressively promoting the invasion, and used his position to help make it happen.
well the US was founded on genocide and plunder so it isn't really surprising that most USians don't have an issue with following in the path of their ancestors. Its a cultural thing. Assuming the US is still around in a thousand years (only 33 short or 12 long generations of descendants) it'll have calmed down and grown up by then.
Bush and Blair have the blood of millions on their hands. While the bloodlust for war wasn't as towering as the US, Blair pushed that shit no end resulting in vomit-inducing flag waving from the press and casual violence against anyone from the Middle East and even folk from India and Pakistan because people are thick as fucking shit.
Standing in parliament and lying about Iraq's 'superguns' and potential biological and chemical threats to the UK like Iraq had suddenly swapped places with France. With the rest of his fucking gang of government monsters shifting uncomfortably in their seats because they knew every single fucking word was a fucking lie.
The fact that Blair weaseled out of politics and has made millions off the back of misery he was complicit in speaks volumes about what a fucking demon he really is. Converting to Catholcism was the final insult to those who died, allowing him to simply pray the guilt away.
I hope when he dies he suffers for it, no-one should shed any tears for him.
Fucking bastard.
Bush needs to be :the-doohickey: by someone whose grievance was probably that Bush's paintings were plagiarising their own work.
The media would attempt civility stuff first, but both sides will be 'allowed' to dab as the establishment don't care about aesthetics anymore.
To be fair, I don't think he should be tried for war crimes either.
He should be executed without trial, no need to waste time or resources.
I think he should be tried publicly. I want the trial to be the top story for months and months, as Bush, his co-conspirators and the public who supported him are forced to listen to endless testimonies of the evil they did.
The trials are not meant to secure justice for these monsters. The trials are there to educate the world about the horrors they caused and to build a clear understanding of exactly how evil it was.
And then he should be executed to drive the point home.
Build a replica of Department of civilian defense public shelter no. 25 in the Nevada desert and [redacted]
CW War crimes
Most of his rehabilitation comes from just wanting to make Trump look worse, even though W. objectively killed far more people and probably broke more laws. Some libs have even been caught saying that they would have voted for Hitler over Trump. Edit: holy shit, even Noam Chomsky said this, he fucking sucks so fucking hard. Anyone who thinks Chomsky is useful needs to read the red sails articles about him. Even Parenti is so much better.
I actually think Reagan was more evil than Trump; pretty sure he killed more people. And Reagan is treated like a saint by conservatives and liberals alike. Telling libs that Reagan was worse than Trump usually gets them pretty agitated.
Trump sucks but he was the least shitty president since JFK. People will say that Carter was alright, neglecting the fact that neoliberalism began with him, as did amerikkka’s decision to fund Afghan Nazis to destroy the USSR. I mean, Trump still killed a shitload of people and fucked up pretty much everything, I guess most of the damage was confined to the USA. His complete incompetence gave the global south some time to organize.
W. objectively killed far more people and probably broke more laws.
But he wasn't a public embarrassment for Republicans. He was a Compassionate Conservative who just wanted to do oil paintings of feet.
He was actually an embarrassment though. He couldn’t open his mouth without saying the most foolish thing you could possibly imagine. It still causes me physical pain to hear him speaking. I guess he never breached muh norms by talking shit about the CIA or other presidents, but he was still an abominable public speaker, very much like Biden actually. Biden’s presidency is so much like a repeat of W.’s, it’s uncanny, except the political party in power is reversed, and democrats will be furious if you talk about Biden this way, even though he is objectively fucking dog shit. God willing, the “nothing fundamental will change” president will go down as the one who failed to maintain the status quo.
You'll notice a lot of Bush's rehabilitation has involved these really inoffensive interviews that steer wide of his time in office.
Nobody actually wants to remember the Mission Accomplished guy who nearly got pegged with a shoe.
As to Biden, I think he's got both fingers in the dam. It won't fall on his watch shy of forces outside his control.
But the next guy... idk. Everyone in the party is so nakedly just in this shit for the grift. What would a Buttigieg / Eric Adams admin even do?
