{"id":2981,"date":"2006-09-16T02:05:29","date_gmt":"2006-09-16T09:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/16\/77-in-us-unable-to-learn-a-lesson\/"},"modified":"2006-09-16T02:07:23","modified_gmt":"2006-09-16T09:07:23","slug":"77-in-us-unable-to-learn-a-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/16\/77-in-us-unable-to-learn-a-lesson\/","title":{"rendered":"77% in U.S. Unable to Learn a Lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems to me that when the Bush administration makes loud accusations about a Middle Eastern state&#8217;s &#8220;weapons of mass destruction&#8221; programs, the average Joe would question it.<\/p>\n<p>After all, they must have made up a hundred lies about Iraq: that the motivation for the invasion was to protect the people of America, that Iraq had &#8220;reconstituted nuclear weapons&#8221; (the evidence for which was forged documents and rocket tubes), that Saddam had a &#8220;long-standing relationship&#8221; with al Qaeda (providing training for plane hijackings, support for Mohammed Atta in Prague, even a wooden leg for abu-Musab al-Zarqawi), that there were storehouses full of &#8220;anthrax, sarin and VX nerve gas&#8221; &#8220;north, south, east and west of [Baghdad and Tikrit] somewhat,&#8221; that there were fleets of remote control planes that could fly to America and spray people with germs, that the Sunni insurgency fights for their &#8220;crazed ideology,&#8221; that &#8220;we&#8217;re making progress,&#8221; that&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Now the administration claims that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. This even though anyone who watches closely can tell you that Iran&#8217;s capability to produce enriched uranium is far from what is required to produce weapons grade material. The CIA says it would take them a decade if they were to begin trying now, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has had open access to all their nuclear sites for more than three years with &#8220;no indication&#8221; that there is anything untoward going on.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/rasmussen\/20060915\/pl_rasmussen\/irannuclearweapons20060915\">77% percent<\/a> of the people of this country believe that Iran will have nukes soon. So there&#8217;s your fake <em>cassus belli<\/em>, folks, it&#8217;s already done. (Not that Iran having nukes is any of America&#8217;s business, but neither I nor the Constitution set the premises around here.)<\/p>\n<p>Congratulations America! Your stupidity and child-like willingness to follow the leader will continue to get untold thousands of people killed.<\/p>\n<p>But every action has an equal and opposite reaction. One may recall the sage advice of the ancient Greek Oracle (via Malcolm Garris): &#8220;If the king attacks Persia, he will destroy a great empire.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>(Comments welcome over at <a href=\"http:\/\/thestressblog.com\/2006\/09\/16\/77-of-americans-incapable-of-learning-a-lesson\/\">Stress<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems to me that when the Bush administration makes loud accusations about a Middle Eastern state&#8217;s &#8220;weapons of mass destruction&#8221; programs, the average Joe would question it. After all, they must have made up a hundred lies about Iraq: that the motivation for the invasion was to protect the people of America, that Iraq [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2981"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}