Time for some positive Atonement

I found this comment on a blog and thought it especially good:

Time for some positive atonement.

1. Public demand for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the origins of the war. What Congress did under deLay et al was a whitewash.

2. Public apology to the families of the 3500 US soldiers who have died, the 20,000 or so who are blind, maimed, brain damaged, or otherwise wounded, whose lives will never ever be the same.

3. Public acknowledgment of our responsibility for the "excess deaths" of some 200,000 to 700,000 Iraqis. These are the results of the Lancet study, which was conducted by eminent social scientists who used accepted techniques and rigorous statistics. And while you are at it, apology to those scientists too, for the smoke and smear job conducted by the WSJ and other neo con organs. They basically said that it isn't so. Just like W.

3. Public apology to those that you helped the Bushies smear as traitors. Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. The Democratic Party. (and pronounce it right, with the "ic"). Remember W's speech before the 2006 election "If the Democrats win, the terrorists win, and America loses." France, the oldest friend the US has (as many or more French died at Yorktown as did Americans) whose publicly stated objections to the war (insufficient intelligence regarding WMD and absence of a clear plan for the inevitable occupation).

Oh yeah, and denounce Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol and most of the staff of National Review for being what they are. Brownshirts. And apologize to Wm F Buckley for helping ruin the conservative movement.

4. Public demand for the resignation of Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rice, with impeachment proceedings to follow if they won't. Depending on the outcome of the investigation in #1, prosecution for war crimes (one of the counts at Nuremberg was initiation by Germany of an aggressive war against Poland without any reasonable casus belli).

And those are just a start.

As for deeper meanings, I think it is a lot simpler than you think. The US uber nationalists were frustrated that they could not find clear enemies to blame for 9/11, and they did not want to look into the depths of the relationship of petro colonialism to Jihadism. All that they could find was a ragtag band of crazies, most of them Saudi (and they are oil rich friends of the Bush family, so we cannot go after them).

So, like the Nazis (who could not understand how their technologically superior nation had lost WWI), they invented some enemies. Instead of the Jews and the Communists, it's Moslems and the Democrats.

It can happen here. Face it.

Jeffrey Harris