WMD and Voter Fraud: Same Right Wing Obsession and Same Tragic End

The crime committed in Iraq was more costly than most Americans know; what will the Big Lie crime cost us?

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

In the hurried runup to get US troops into Iraq, to finish what George H.W. Bush didn’t get done, as the neocons were famous for saying, the evildoers in the Bush W. White House worked tirelessly to get Americans and the world to believe that Iraq was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.

As we all so tragically now know, the Bush team lied to us, to the world. So much of how they lied then reminds me of what is happening today in the never-seeming-to-end hunt for voter fraud. What is it about Republicans and grand lies? What is it they don’t get that these forays into fantasy weaken the foundation and make us less resilient to coming back the next time?

I can’t help but think that if George W. Bush, who is now so vehemently opposed to Trump, hadn’t so blatantly lied to us, then not only would a Trump likely never have been possible, but something so obviously corrupt and sinister like the voter-fraud fraud would have never taken root.

The War That Shouldn’t Have Been

We went to war with a significantly weakened Iraq. We said that they were complicit in the attacks of 9/11 but had absolutely nothing to do with that day. We invaded that nation to “search for the smoking gun that could become a mushroom cloud,” to paraphrase Condoleezza Rice. Cheney and company told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and it was our duty as the world’s protector to find them.

In the vernacular of international relations, the invasion of Iraq was a preemptive war. In layperson’s terms, we rudely invaded a sovereign country and nearly succeeded in turning it into a parking lot.

Today, we all know that illegal invasion has a sad and tragic history. We also know, thanks to countless reports, books, movies, hearings, and just through the grapevine, that nothing even close to resembling WMDs was ever found; they didn’t locate a manufacturer of firecrackers, let alone nuclear warheads.

It was all a hoax, a lie, a deceit; it was a manipulation of our trust, and once most Americans figured out that we had been duped by no less than the president of the United States, the already waning trust we had for our government suffered a potentially mortal blow. It was like a deep gash had been cut across the body of our institutions, one so deep that less than two decades later, we have become a shadow of who we once were.

Having looked so mockingly into the eyes of deceit, hubris, and corruption, it almost seems as if the reflection from the mirror has stepped out to become our closest ally. The reflection became half of our nation. It had full possession of our recently deposed president.

Right now, is the perfect time for a Bruce Springsteen quote:

My father said, “Son, we’re lucky in this town, it’s a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps its arms around you, nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone.
You know that a flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone.
Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t (Springsteen Lyrics: Long Walk Home).”

Let me repeat it: there never was WMD in Iraq, the rods and the “yellow cake” that were supposed to prove that they were actively seeking to make a bomb, as reported by the infamous Judith Miller article in our bastion of journalistic integrity, The New York Times never happened. Nothing was found because “nothing” can’t be found — nothing is nothing.

The search for WMD reminds me of the search for voter fraud; and, in the same way, that Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and many other nasty little dwarves knew that WMD would never be located, so too Trump and his allies know that voter fraud never will be found.

However, the actual “finding” of misdeeds is not the goal here. The process becomes the end so long as the search always reveals almost nothing. The search aims to inflame and fan those flames of theoretical voter fraud. Oh my God, can you imagine the audacity of them stealing our victory?!

That sentiment, spoken at suppers all over red America, should unite them against America. It’s working.

The Aftermath of Iraq

Thousands of our fellow countrymen and women died to turn that WMD lies into a “great, patriotic moment.” While great it never was, simply because we entered that war under false pretenses, it did become a nearly two-decade-long saga that would effectively cleave our nation into two halves.

One half is characterized by a lack of critical analysis, which demands they obey anything a president says as absolute, divine truths; the other half is the rest of us, the skeptical ones, the patriots.

The rest of us ask for government proof when it says, “It is necessary to send our youth to another country to die.” But even many of us, the skeptical, weren’t so in the wake of 9/11. That tragedy and that utter failure by our government to protect us both united and blinded many of us to the nuanced truth the Bush administration was selling as absolute, set-in-stone fact.

Bush was telling us that 9/11 was a tragedy — agreed. He was telling us he needed to protect us from another — agreed. He told us that if terrorists got hold of WMDs, it would be a tragedy like none other — decided. He was telling us he had proof that Saddam Hussein had those weapons, but the only evidence he gave us was his word based on the lies his people were feeding us. Many of us couldn’t imagine that a president would so blatantly lie.

But, here we have it, it was all, indeed, a lie.

Imagine the frustration, sadness, and hate that many Americans feel. In fits of patriot fury, their loved ones raced off to that desert to fight for our nation but gave their lives for nothing. Did the deaths of 36,000 Americans in Iraq soothe those urges to feel god-like by power-hungry, not-so-smart middle-aged white men? I am sure it did. Sadly, most of those men were too callous and vile to have ever felt remorse for their lies and now either die peacefully or relax in their wealth.

And just like they lied, so does Trump and every Republican, every American who squawks about voter fraud.

People aren’t supposed to do such things in real life. Most of us, when we do, get punished. Only politicians, only Republicans, always seem to get away with such destructive, treasonous behavior.

Scorch the Earth but Justify the Lie

Osama bin Laden was cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, and mysteriously, the US attack was slowed. It gave America’s number one enemy a chance to escape. He did. He played his part. The death of bin Laden would have meant victory for America, ending the war in Afghanistan and getting the boys back home.

America needed to keep that war going so it could get “the right war” going with Iraq, and so, a verbal assault was launched by the Bush White House to scare the bejesus out of the nation and the world. Unprovable facts were made up and hidden under the guise of national security. The country was fed a steady diet of hyperbole-heavy tales of what would happen if Hussein was left in charge of Iraq.

With patriotism surging and even transitioning to nationalism, truth would become the willing victim, sacrificed to the hubris of messianic neocons and idealistic elites with zero understanding of how places like Iraq functioned. They found a boogeyman in the face of Saddam Hussein; needing a crime, one was also found — WMD.

Let’s now just replace WMD with voter fraud; let’s replace the swarthy face of Saddam Hussein with the dark complexions of Black Americans and the beginnings of illegal aliens “sneaking” up from Mexico to rape and cast votes. It almost seems like the fake hunt for WMD was spring training for the voter fraud mania of 2020 and 2021.

In the ways that the Bush administration chipped away at our freedoms by passing things like the Patriot Act and creating the Department of Homeland Security, so too, Republicans use the lie of voter fraud to pass law after law to make it very difficult to cast votes if you are likely to vote against them.

They have also constructed dozens of escape hatches from electoral defeats — in some places, any citizen can claim voter fraud, and the Republicans in charge can then declare that the results be voided, entitling them with the opportunity to choose the victor — we all know who they will choose, right? They will select a traitor to our nation, someone loyal to Donald Trump.

Can you believe that this is happening in America, people? The numbers that added up thanks to the WMD crime can make a sane person cry. What numbers will we be writing twenty years from now?

1,000,000 Iraqis died during the 17-year occupation of Iraq. 36,000 Americans died. Every 24 minutes, a veteran from the Iraqi or Afghanistan wars kills himself. 2 trillion dollars was wasted on one of the greatest crimes in our nation’s history — maybe the greatest.

The next great crime is being perpetuated as I write. Arguably, it could be even more horrendous than the Iraqi lie. What will be the cost of the Big Lie to our nation? To the world?