Silly Thinking

It sort of bothers me that some "liberal" critics are now writing about the missing WMD in Iraq as if they were actually fooled by the Bush administration's lies before the war.

Nobody who was at all credible thought that Saddam's Iraq was a threat to the US. Even warmongers like Rumsfield would admit that the war was really being fought in order to stop Iraq from becoming a threat.

The real justification for the war was that the United States enjoys what Chomsky calls "a fifth freedom."

Here's an excerpt from Noam Chomsky's "The Culture of Terrorism" that I think explains this freedom well.

"The central--and not very surprising--conclusion that emerges from the documentary and historical record is that the U.S. international and security policy, rooted in the structure of power in the domestic society, has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call the 'Fifth Freedom,' understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced. This guiding principle was overlooked when Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced the Four Freedoms that the U.S. and its allies would uphold in the conflict with fascism: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear." "