Here's the most important reason to investigate:
SO IT DOESN'T HAPPEN AGAIN!!

(i.e. learn HOW/WHY it happened, and make
changes in laws/govt structure/decision making,
etc, to mitigate the obvious limitations of the
system that were abused).

Even though this is all true, necessary and unlikely, I'd like to be the first to point out this is actually a stump speech for his bid to become president in '08 just as was Santorum's "concession" speech.

I'm going to have to disagree with Jonathan on this one. Don't get me wrong, Bushco. has a lot to answer for lying us into Iraq, but spending a lot of time on Congressional hearings to determine "who knew what, when" is a fruitless endeavor for several reasons:

* If there were a "smoking gun" in all this, it would have been found by now after three Woodward books, memoirs from Paul O'Neill, the Plame investigation, etc. Those sources have already turned up lots of evidence against the administration, and in fact I would support more of this type of private investigative reporting.
* Without the suspicion that there exists clear evidence demostrating "Bush lied" (e.g. videotape of the president saying "I am lying to the American people", this is going to turn into a witch hunt pretty fast, and recent history has shown the American people don't have the stomach for much of that.
* Kucinich's reasoning is--to be charitable to a man I often agree with--misguided. We will not be trapped "emotionally and spiritually in Iraq" if we don't meticulously chronicle the neocon process of dissembling. I'm sympathetic to the idea that an accounting will help prevent us from repreating such a boneheaded move, but I don't think it would be very useful in determining current policy, or at least not as effective as, say, a full and sober Congressional accounting of where we are in Iraq now.

In fact that last point is where I think the Congress should go in dealing with Iraq: get generals in to testify to Congress about the real state of the Iraq war, and make it public. The Dems should not take the bait of proposing a strategy now because so much of the recent happy talk is obscuring the truth (Bush's recent "conversion' not withstanding--he really wonders where everyone got the idea that he thought the war was going well?).

In summary, rehashing what went on 4 years ago is not as useful as determining what's going on now. The former can be handled by the usual historical process, the latter needs to be put in motion via the Congress now.

We will not be trapped "emotionally and spiritually in Iraq" if we don't meticulously chronicle the neocon process of dissembling.

I'm not so sure. America is still, in my opinion, "trapped emotionally and spiritually in Vietnam".

Was there ever an investigation of the Tonkin Gulf incident? Has it ever been brought into the national consciousness - like by being part of the high school history curriculum?

Jonathan, you're very much on track about this, as is Kucinich.

One reason the US keeps getting into these types of debacles is that the people who are involved are never repudiated. The whole issue of bringing someone like Robert Gates into the DoD is yet another example of how the architects and engineers of thoroughly failed policies keep coming back for decades. Why people are still listening to Kissinger is beyond me, but according to Woodward there he is giving advice on Iraq.

The Watergate guys (Liddy, Colson) are still looked to for commentary. Ollie North has a TV show on FOX. People who cut their teeth in the Reagan and Bush administrations during Iran-contra and Panama like Rice are in top positions now, and we can expect that they'll be around for another couple of decades unless their policy fiascos are hung around their necks now like so many Medals of Faildom.

I think this is terribly important. I mean, if one, two, or five hundred thousand Americans died because the Administration had mislead people, I have to believe people would want to know what the hell happened and who was responsible down to the last dead person. Just because it's dead foreigners doesn't make it less important. In fact, it may make it more important that extraordinary effort is put into this, to show the world that this is not the America you stand for, one that is recklessly negligent, and then moves on.

A lack of proper analysis is a bad thing, but that combined with lies is criminal. I mean, if you can put some poor joker in jail for voting illegally, surely to God you should put someone away for lies that result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Just because a guy/gal wears a suit and is responsible for really big things, doesn't mean he/she cannot be a mass murderer.

The truth does matter

If we don't exorcise this particular demon a la Dennis, we will be forever haunted by Bush's, Rice's, Rumsfeld's, and Cheney's face, decorating, each in its turn, the forever slowly turning head on Tio Sam's body, much like Linda Blair in the Exorcist.

Does anyone have an inside line to Pope Ratz?

One wonders how much material might be leaving the premises with Rumsfeld that properly belongs to the US archives-- and I don't mean buttons off of keyboards or sundry white house bath towels, but memos and hard drives, etc.

I agree that this is very important and of a high order, but I think it's # 2 or #3 on the list. #1 being get the hell out of there/get a non-militaristic system in place for doling out aid and civilian-reparations and #2 severely throwing our energies into energy reform. We know that these are good policies and that the facts are behind them, and we need to get the boat steered towards them ASAP. History and cleaning up the trut is important, but more important on a, say, 1 year scale versus a few month scale. I don't know maybe I'm too much of a bricks and mortor and atoms kinds of person (rather than words and bits) but I'm not convinced any Congressional hearing will get us enough truth to be more worthwhile than the real lives and ecologies saved by making the other two goals are vigorous first priorities.

2013, huh. You're an optimist, I see.

If history is any guide, they will invade and take over some small totally defenseless unallied country in the next two years. Some island in the Carribean, perhaps. It'll be great, totally triumphant. And I don't expect any American casualties. After that it's time to start getting ready for the next big one.

The reason there won't be any serious attempt by the Democratic leadership to investigate how we were buffaloed into Iraq is because the people who count in the Democratic party all went along with Bush, knowing at the time that he was full of shit. And now these same people are going to push for a more aggressive posture vs. Iran and for 'something' to be done about Darfur (never mind the fact that our involvement there will only make things worse). God bless him, but Kucinich is virtually alone among Democrats. His "inside-outside" Progressive Democrats have no voice in the party.

There's some damning stuff in the first Suskind book about NSC meetings in 2001...but they really don't make much difference when it's just Paul O'Neil's memories appearing in a book. We need the videotapes they took of the meetings. And much, much more. -- Schwartz

We have notes from Tony Blair's top advisers saying the "facts are being fixed around the policy." We have the map of the Iraqi oil fields from Cheney's energy meetings, which met well before 9/11.

These are more than smoking guns. It's like we're actually watching the gun being fired in slow motion. And yet there's been a collective yawn from the press corps. Maybe that will change, but it seems unlikely that we will get further evidence that is more dramatic than the Downing Street Memos.

BTW, we're never going to get videotape. Rumsfeld was in the Nixon administration and I'm sure he learned he needs to destroy evidence. Cheney too.

Even if there are no memos or videotapes, questions could be pursued. Bush and his cohorts would not be able to respond with inane non-answers, then have the "reporters" pull their forelocks and sit down. That alone is worth our support of Kucinich, but most important, as Brant wrote, is so IT DOESN'T HAPPEN AGAIN.

the best reason i've read in the comments so far for why we won't/shouldn't investigate is that many of the democrats were complicit all along.

i'd like to add that one of the problems with this war is so many americans really aren't interested. they don't care about iraqi people. so headlines about death and destruction don't matter much.

that means (a) an investigation is likely to be perceived (or will easily be spun) as partisan bullsh*t, because citizens don't care about the horrors; and (b) our task in building a better world has to include figuring out how to help people know more and care more.

me, i can't be bothered, because Friends is on in reruns at 6, 6:30 AND 10. and that makes a full evening, 5 days a week.

>These are more than smoking guns. It's like we're actually watching the gun being fired in slow motion. And yet there's been a collective yawn from the press corps. Maybe that will change, but it seems unlikely that we will get further evidence that is more dramatic than the Downing Street Memos.

This is exactly right; these things are out in the open, and the press has largely ignored them or filed them under "conspiracy theory". With the recent Bush defeat, encouraging the press to wake up should be priority #1, especially now that they can no longer blithely ignore the unpopularity of this president.

Jonathan, thank you for the link to the Robert Parry article. To my mind, his piece criticizing Clinton's forbearance of Reagan-Bush scandals boils down to 3 things: (1) it did not appease the Republicans, who continued to dog Clinton's every step, (2) Clinton thought it would derail his ongoing domestic policy, and (3) we never completely learned about the US--and the Bush family--covert involvement in the Middle East, a fact that hurt us in the 2000 election and our later policy in Iraq.

These are interesting arguments (though regarding point (1), I personally Clinton could never have diffused the incredible GOP odium toward him; I truly don't believe a savvy politician like him believed this, and the only evidence seems to be a quote ten years later from his own memoirs), and there is certainly some merit in them. But what about the truth that has already been revealed and met with a collective yawn? It seems those who support Kucinich may have a secondary goal: Convincing the American to _believe_ what they've already heard, what's already been documented. If that's the case, then the exercise will quickly devolve into a star chamber

"i'd like to add that one of the problems with this war is so many americans really aren't interested. they don't care about iraqi people. so headlines about death and destruction don't matter much."

Bingo. Any idea how to change that?

Wait a minute - lying the country into war is an old and glorious American tradition, started by our roughest and toughest, Theodore Roosevelt. Why would you want to do anything that gives this up? This, more than anything else, is what makes us America: starting wars for phony reasons.

Kidding aside, my one serious contribution is: who gives a shit about complicit Democrats? Those fuckers should just lump it. If they can't admit to their mistakes, then their colleagues should call them on it. Otherwise, what sort of half-ass reconquista are we running?

I'd like to think Mr. Kucinich has this purpose in mind: (put most succinctly) "the truth will set you free".

Unfortunately, there may be no way to illustrate what I mean without going all warm-and-fuzzy-buzzword, but unless you admit and own up to a mistake, you can't progress forward past that mistake.

Its easy to over-react to some characterizations of this war, but the fact remains: the most powerful country in the world chose to engage in a war of aggression and to invade a much weaker country, and (literally) countless thousands have needlessly perished as a result. This is something that shouldn't - and isn't - sitting well with the American psyche.

http://www.darrelplant.com/blog_item.php?ItemRef=583

An unsourced quote from Gary Wills about the 1972 Presidential election -- possibly from The New York Review of Books back in the day -- quoted in Sen. George McGovern's autobiography: Grassroots (p. 245):

"Vietnam is the shared crime that has turned our country into...a pact of blood. Now patriotism means the complicity of fellows in a crime; if we are all in it, no one is worse than the rest; we excuse each other; we keep the secret. That is why the members of the pact had to re-elect a war criminal as their ruler. Senator George S. McGovern was hysterically feared because he was an accuser.

"Members of the pact most fear the man who has not joined in their mystery of communal criminality. When ten men commit a crime, and the eleventh refuses, the ten will turn on him, fear and suspect him. They resent him because he is free, his mouth not gagged by the knowledge of his own guilt."

I want to mount my own hobbyhorse and ride it.

One of the things that is probably being covered up is the number of civilians the US itself has killed. If you believe the recent Lancet paper on Iraqi deaths (I'm on the fence, but lean towards thinking the death toll is much higher than IBC's 50,000), then the Iraqi death toll is around 600,000 and roughly a third (possibly more) of these were killed by Americans.

Now if that's true it's not only a massive amount of killing--it's also a massive amount of killing that has gone almost wholly unreported. If you're an obsessive on this subject as I am, you'll know that in Iraq Body Count statistics in most months (excluding March/April 2003 and a handful of others), the US forces are reportedly killing an average of 1 or 2 civilians a day. This does not seem plausible to me.

If the Lancet paper is right (about which again I'm an agnostic), the correct figure is more like 200 a day. Maybe that's wrong. The point is that it's darn near impossible to tell from media reports what's going on.

Nobody other than the Lancet team seems interested in doing surveys to determine the true death toll, even though people have done surveys in Iraq asking all kinds of questions, including whether people favor attacks on American forces and in one case, how many households had lost people to violence UNDER SADDAM. Not under us. How peculiar that nobody (except the Lancet team) has ever asked that.

I don't know how many people we have put into the ground in Iraq, either directly or indirectly. But you'd think a country full of decent people would want to know. And maybe there's someone inside the Pentagon or the CIA who knows the approximate answer--you'd think a country fighting a counterinsurgency would want to keep track of numbers like that, even if they don't want to make them public. If so, we ought to force the numbers out.

Won't happen, of course. But it's worth trying to make it happen.

The Democrats don't understand that this country is already tearing apart, and Iraq is the fault line which is doing it. Better to get ahead of the process than fall through the crack.

I supported Kucinich's bid for the nomination, and would again. However, an investigation is pointless. Neither party wants to be faced with the truth, so one particular player in all this, the only country that wanted Iraq attacked, will be excluded from investigation, blame and punishment, just as its agents and shills here have not been held to account for the parts they played.

I will save this and enter it again when we all sit down and talk about the illegal invasion of Iran.

Here's the most important reason not to investigate: SO IT CAN HAPPEN AGAIN.

hmmm -- "investiGATE" -- a likely future rightwing headline attempting to make a scandal about any investigations.

Business as usual is not enough any more. What has happened in Iraq is a really, really big transgression, of global-historical scale, committed by corrupt and morally bankrupt American leaders guilty of the supreme crime--a Crime Against Peace. This enterprise will bankrupt all of our souls if we don't examine this hard truth.

I highly recommend reading, twice, "Four Hands", by Paco Ignaio Taibo II. You will not regret it. Particularly the Señores Schwarz, Perrin, Scruggs and assorted hangers on. Shucks, bet they've already read it.

Even after all the UN Resolutions calling upon Atlantis to disarm and their continued refusal to allow inspectors into their watery caverns you still wish to appease them?

If mushroom clouds suddenly appear over Quivira or Cibola then this will be on your head sir.

I think the reason Americans never got "over" Vietnam is because they refuse to acknowledge the lies and the civilian victims. Same thing is happening in Iraq.

I support Kucinich, but I don't know how to make this happen.

The desire to conform is the root of all evil. In washington that desire is most dangerous. The only way the congress will investigate Iraq is if they feel the american people have their back. The media are going to crucify any investigation into the truth so our representatives need to hear directly from us, we the people, that we want answers. Write your congresspeople Susan.

Integrity.
We stand for the rule of law.
And if that means we have to have potentially divisive hearings, then its time to have some integrity, and stand for something.

I think one of the failures of Vietnam was the failure to hold hearings. to hold people accountable. to set the record straight about just what a crap fest it was.

And as a result we have some dip shit in the oval office who thought that vietnam was a great idea except that we didnt put enough national effort into it.
And he's surrounded by a bunch of his fellow Vietnam era wack jobs who think the same way.