I heartily agree with commentator Frederic Hill that the U.S. is long overdue for its own version of Great Britain's Chilcot Report on the Iraq war, lest the crimes of the neo-cons and their murderous "regime change" efforts remain undocumented, unpunished and likely to be repeated, with disastrous effects for our nation and the world ("Where is our Iraq war report?" July 8).
But while it is totally appropriate to put the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz cabal from the Bush 43 administration "in the dock" for their crimes and lies, why give Team Obama a free pass?
The execution of Obama's decision to overthrow Kadafi in Libya may have been of shorter duration and less cost than the Iraq war but it arguably did as much damage by throwing Libya into the hands of Wahhabi jihadists and creating a refugee crisis unmatched in scale since the end of World War II.
Moreover, the Obama administration's current fixation on overthrowing the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad has put our nation in a de facto alliance with ISIS, official protests notwithstanding. (Who, pray tell, takes over Syria if Assad is toppled? The Campfire Girls? The Rotary Club?)
Do we have to wait, as in Shakespeare's Hamlet, until after the stage is littered with dead bodies to ask how all that came about?
The Iraq war was based on two big untruths: The myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the equally pernicious whopper that the Iraqi government was somehow behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The outrageous nature of this falsification becomes even more clear today in light of the recently revealed fact that both presidents Bush and Obama have maintained a tight lid on 28 pages of the highly classified report on 9/11 for almost 15 years. The small number of individuals who have read those documents have insisted, almost in unison, that they strongly implicate the government of Saudi Arabia in financing and directing the 19 hijackers in the months before they carried out the attack.
This suggests that the whole time our government was claiming to be fighting a war on terror, bombing the wrong countries and shredding the U.S. Constitution in the name of national security, our leaders were covering up the identities of the real paymasters of al-Qaida and company and touting those same foreign governments as our most reliable allies.
Does this not merit a full investigation and housecleaning, beginning with the declassification of the secret 28 pages of our own Iraq report?
Doug Mallouk, Catonsville