Curveball admits lies that led to Iraq war. Yet those who doubted back in 2002 are still marginalized as less credible than those who believed.

In this article in The Guardian, Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, nicknamed 'Curveball' admits that he made it all up. By 'all', he is referring to the various stories of Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction program that was the primary reason that the Bush/Cheney administration used as justification for invading and occupying Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and nearly 5,000 American soldiers are now dead. The war will end up costing American taxpayers $3 trillion when all is said and done. Whenever the GOP blabs on about the insanely high national debt, we never hear about the two wars fought on a credit card. But the Iraqi occupation is a big reason why the country is going broke, deprived of blood and treasure on a damned crusade that was founded on the falsehoods of a now-admitted liar. Which is what many of us, those you ridiculed and mocked, have known for the last nine years.

None of this should be shocking to most of you. Even the most hardened hawk has admitted years ago that the Iraq occupation was either a terrible idea or was conducted poorly, and that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction with which to threaten us or its neighbors. But here's the rub. There were quite a few of us who knew all of this way back in 2002. We smelled a con right from the get-go. We smelled a ruse to win GOP seats in the 2002 midterm election by whipping of war-fever as a distraction from the Enron-battered economy. But we unbelievers were mocked, ridiculed, called unpatriotic and treasonous. Meanwhile, over the last decade, those who believed the lies and then came around are held up in higher esteem than those who never believed in the first place. Why is that? Why does the media and the political circles hold in such high esteem those who voted for war or supported invasion and then changed their minds, and why does it still ridicule or ignore those who knew the truth from the very start?

In a sane world, wouldn't those who were not conned be considered wiser than those who fell for the it only to change their minds only when the wool could no longer cover their eyes? Why are those who failed and then admitted failure given more credibility on the national stage than those who saw the truth and fought like hell to expose the lies in the first place? Why indeed...

Scott Mendelson