Seymour Hersh on AlterNet
Ah, I think you may be over-intellectualizing. You can't begin to know what's in their head. Look, America is a very racist country and war brings out the worst in it. I have said - several times, publicly - that the one thing I've always liked about Bill Clinton is that he was the first American president since World War II to bomb white people.
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The only problem with that thinking is that it's been more than a year and a half since we went in. And right now, the abuses in the prisons, the bombings, and the attacks, the violence in the country are now being caused by us. Is that a moral position we want to be in? Of course, it is an unintended consequence, but it is still very much a consequence.
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So I read Bob's first book, "Bush at War," which begins with 9/11 and ends with the invasion [of Iraq] in March, 18 months later. And it was not until months later that I realized what it was about that book that really troubled me.
It was that at no point in these 300-400 pages of this book does any of the major players in the Bush administration say to one of his aides, "Hey, what's this Muslim thing here? And why don't you give me a little paper on this thing they call the [putting on a Texan drawl] Koh-ran."
This lack of curiosity about Arab motives. What the assumption was that the Muslim world was mad at us because we had what they wanted. The president still has this notion.
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Look, I'm glad the New York Times and the Washington Post have done their mea culpa. I just think they should have done those mea culpas before March of 2003 - before the war began, because that would have been important.
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Oh, and there's a new #1 film villain in town.