Democracy for Vancouver

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said he thought the invitation to Ahmadinejad was a mistake “because he comes literally with blood on his hands.”

Yes, Ahmadinejad is a nut. He thinks Israel should disappear. But U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) thinks we should wipe Mecca and Medina off the map in response to any future terrorist attack on U.S. soil. How is that different?

And what Lieberman is saying about “blood on his hands” is beyond ridiculous - who has more blood on his hands than George Bush, Lieberman’s best girlfriend? Iran has not engaged in any wars of aggression (or preemption) under Ahmadinejad, and what it has done in Iraq has been in support of the Shiites the last Preznit Bush let get slaughtered after telling them to rise up against Saddam in 1991.

Iran has been such an easy strawman since the Hostage Crisis. And since Saddam isn’t around anymore to use as a convenient boogie-man, Ahmadinejad is the stand-in. He’s an easy one to hate, no doubt - and he doesn’t make it easy on those of us who would like to prevent an unprovoked war on Iran.

But while a nutter, he did ask some pretty prescient questions at his appearance at Columbia yesterday, including:

“Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?”

Good question.

And while all the news outlets seemed to view Ahmadinejad’s comments on 9/11 as questioning al Qaeda’s responsibility, I read these comments completely differently:

“If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly — why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved — and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined,” Ahmadinejad said.

I believe that 19 al Qaeda-sponsored hijackers executed the terroist plot known as 9/11. I believe that the buildings fell because structural steel was weakened by fire, and the momentum and force of each floor pancaking onto the one below brought the whole of each building down (in much the same way that engineers say if you knocked out the most upriver dam in the Columbia-Snake river system, all the dams below it would be successively knocked out by the combined force of the water impounded behind each dam). I believe that a plane, and not a missile, hit the Pentagon.

But I also believe that we have not dug deep to understand the root causes of 9/11, and why those 19 hijackers were so driven to hate the United States. We have not looked into the U.S. role in propping up the deplorable social and political conditions in our allied countries in the Middle East - chief among them Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The invasion and occupation of Iraq could have been prevented if BushCo hadn’t been so adept at tying Saddam to 9/11 - so much so that one third of Americans still believe this outrageous lie.

Ahmadinejad is crazy and dangerous, in much the same way that Bush, Cheney and Lieberman are crazy and dangerous. Unfortunately, Bush, Cheney and Lieberman have access to much more and deadlier weapons - and they’re not afraid to use them.