Who wanted to go to war?

Yesterday while having lunch I overheard a woman at the next table pointing out to her friends that "99.7% of the people in this country wanted to go to war, wanted to just go over there and get it over with." Her point was that "we" all wanted to do it, and now the country is turning against the war, forgetting that we were eager to start it.

I don't know about her statistic, but I believe that in general she's right -- but she failed to point out that the reason so many people were for it had to do with four issues. First, we were traumatized and horrified because of the 9/11 events and wanted someone to pay for it. Our government led us to believe that attacking Iraq would serve that purpose, because they saw "links" between Iraq and al Qaeda. Second, our government practically drummed into us that if we didn't go over there and attack Saddam and cause "regime change" they'd be coming over here and blowing us up with dirty atomic bombs or killing us off with anthrax or smallpox. Third, our news media were beating the war drums all day long every day, especially Fox news. And fourth, we (the public) didn't have a way to evaluate whether anything we were being told was credible, and our elected representatives in Congress didn't question it because it would have make them look soft and unpatriotic. If they had, they wouldn't have been reelected.

For the record, I was not for the war. I stated from the beginning that it was wrong. Even if Saddam did have the dreaded weapons of mass destruction, so did many other countries and we didn't go preemptively attacking them. It's a terrible precedent. Saddam was a terrible dictator, but he was effectively contained . . . more effectively that we knew.

Now we've made a horrible mess of things, unleashed a civil war where warring factions are trying to see who can gain power, and our naive idea that setting people "free" means they will automatically become democratic peace-loving people is in shambles. The country is in worse shape than it was before we attacked. There is less security than there was under Saddam, and there's no end in sight.

Now our news media talk out of the other side of their collective mouths. They ought to be ashamed of their part in bringing this sad situation about. People are dying every day for our arrogance and there doesn't seem to be any solution in sight. Evidently we didn't learn the right lessons from the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to the swaggering statements that we were going to find Osama bin Laden? In the streets of Bagdad?