Bush's lies cause untold pain by Andrew Greeley

[Guest guest]

http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel27.html

 

ANDREW GREELEY

 

 

 

Bush's lies cause untold pain

 

August 27, 2004

 

BY ANDREW GREELEY

 

I was perhaps 14 years old. I was praying late in the

afternoon in our old basement church. At the front of

the church, beneath the Blessed Mother's altar and our

parish service flag with its many blue stars and, in

1942, a couple of gold stars, a woman was praying

fervently. She was perhaps 12 years older than I was,

fashionably dressed, and apparently distraught.

 

''Dear Lord,'' she cried out suddenly, ''Why didn't

you take me instead of him!''

 

By that time in my life I had become an incorrigible

if precocious news consumer, reading newspapers every

day and listening to the news broadcasts on our Philco

radio. I knew all about strategy and tactics (or

thought I did) and followed the war on maps.

Casualties were a part of war. Men died and that was a

shame, but they had died in a good cause. I was not

aware of the pain of loss so many mothers, daughters,

wives, lovers and sweethearts would suffer. Later I

would hear a news commentator reflect on the line,

''Only one of our planes was lost'' about the tragedy

of the loss of a single life and the agony of those

who had loved that pilot.

 

War, I realized then, is not a game but horrible

madness: 20 million Russians dead, 600,000 Germans

killed in air raids that did not shorten the war by a

single day. Classmates and friends killed in Korea,

children of classmates and friends dead in Vietnam --

each death a loss from which many others would never

recover. Even those who were on the right side, as we

were in the World War, did terrible things and caused

enormous human pain. The woman in St. Angela Church,

from whose grief I had quickly and silently fled, had

told me what war was all about.

 

The brief obituaries of almost a thousand young men

and women dead in Iraq tear at my heart: the promise

of lives obliterated and a wake of pain left behind --

some of it to blight the survivors for the rest of

their lives. And what of the grief of the Iraqi

survivors we watch without much sympathy as they

scream at us on the TV screen? They are only Arabs, no

more important in our calculations than the Indians

wiped out by cowboys or the cavalry in old-fashioned

Westerns.

 

One sees buttons that read, ''At least Clinton's lies

didn't kill anyone.'' Harsh words. Yet the Iraq war is

the result of deceptions in which the president and

his administration have indulged and indeed continue

to indulge. Planned before the attack on the World

Trade Center, it is not part of the so-called war on

terror. Iraq was not involved in the attack and was

not seriously linked with al-Qaida. There were no

weapons of mass destruction. There is little hope of a

peaceful and democratic Iraq. The Iraqis hate us (as

the Gallup Polls there indicate). There will not be a

shift of the balance of power in the Middle East. The

ouster of Saddam Hussein might cost eventually

thousands of American and tens of thousands of Iraqi

lives.

 

Some defenders of the president argue that he did not

deliberately deceive the American people. Yet he and

the vice president and the neo-con intellectuals

continue to repeat the falsehoods, modifying them ever

so slightly so they will enjoy some superficial

plausibility: We may still find the weapons of mass

destruction, there were some ''connections'' between

Iraq and al-Qaida.

 

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it often enough,

some people will believe you. Never admit your

mistakes, never assume responsibility for the

consequences of these mistakes. Keep repeating the

same old deceptions -- often with a show of anger --

and enough people will believe you to re-elect you.

The war proves that you are a strong leader, a man who

can make the tough decisions, a man not greatly

concerned about ''sensitivity.''

 

If ever there were high crimes and misdemeanors, the

lies about the war in Iraq fit that category. We are

an odd people. We impeach a president because he lied

about his private sex life, which killed no one and

harmed no one beyond his family. Yet we support and

may well re-elect a ''strong'' president whose lies

are responsible for so many flag-draped caskets, so

many poignant obituaries, and so much grief. How many

women are sobbing in church these days because of

Bush's lies?