Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an opponent of the Iraq war, is asking the Smithsonian to change some wording about the war that accompanies the newly installed portrait of President George W. Bush.Sanders, an independent, objects to a portion of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s text that says Bush’s two terms in office were “marked by a series of catastrophic events” including “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
The senator said the notion that the attacks were linked in any way to Iraq has been widely debunked and shouldn’t be perpetuated in the museum exhibit.
“The 9/11 attacks did not lead to the war in Iraq,” Sanders said in an interview. “What President Bush was telling us (before the war) was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq was somehow in collusion with Al Qaeda. Those were misstatements of fact, as even President Bush has since acknowledged.”
Per Thomas Jefferson, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." There will be a battle fought over the history of the past eight years. There will be a huge tendency to want to whitewash the past, even from those who were most alert and informed during this period. To brush it off with comforting notions like, "they did what they sincerely believed was best for the country" or "things have changed so it could never have been that bad" or "maybe int twenty years we will be grateful for their vision."
The truth is that they knowingly lied to the American people, they subverted the Constitution and sought near-dictatorial powers, they drained the Treasury to line the coffers of their cronies, they viciously smeared their critics even if they had once been with them. They alienated our traditional international allies and made our name synonymous with torture in the world. They let a city drown and, it can be argued, their willful neglect allowed another to be burned.
The price of freedom is to remember.
And remind.
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