The Missing Link

We cannot understand much of what our misleaders say and do unless we keep one thing in mind: they think we're morons.

Case in point: King George II and Rumsfeld have said repeatedly that the war in Iraq cannot be creating terrorists because "they" attacked us in 2001 before we were in Iraq. The first problem with this is that it is a non sequitur. Even if the U.S. government was not in Iraq on September 11, 2001, it does not follow that the war is not creating anti-American terrorists. It could well be.

But there's a deeper problem with that line. The U.S. government was in Iraq on September 11, 2001. It got there in 1991, thanks to George I, and had never left. It imposed a cruel economic embargo that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and caused untold misery to the rest of that society. And the U.S. Air Force routinely bombed—and killed people in—the so-called "no-fly zones," which were illegally declared by the U.S. and Britain. George II and Rumsfeld are counting on us not to know that.