Bush Bombs in Cleveland---
On the third anniversary of the beginning of his Iraq catastrophe, President
Bush yet again dealt in denial, but this time the carefully screened
audience at the Cleveland City Club wasn't buying it.
Perhaps most on target was an elderly gentleman who cited what he said were
the three main reasons for going to war in Iraq - WMD, Iraq's ties to the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists and the alleged purchase of nuclear material from
Niger - and then noted dryly that all three of these rationales turned out
to be false.
"How do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and
to be sure that the information they are getting now is correct?" he asked
the president.
How indeed? "That's a great question," began Bush by way of dissembling.
"First, just if I may correct a misperception. I don't think we ever said -
at least I know I didn't say - that there was a direct connection between
Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein."
Really? So when he said in his May 1, 2003, "Mission Accomplished" speech on
the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that "we have removed an
ally of al Qaeda," he meant a different gang with the same name as the one
blamed for the attack on the World Trade Center twin towers and Pentagon? It
is his way of finessing the firm conclusion of the bipartisan Sept. 11
commission that Hussein was an opponent of al Qaeda and never an ally. Yet
that didn't stop Bush from again on Monday insisting that "the central front
on the war on terror is Iraq."
Meanwhile, that old "central front," wooly Afghanistan, is now all sewed up,
Bush reassures. "Twenty-five million people are now free, and Afghanistan is
no longer a safe haven for the terrorists." Apparently the president missed
the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Maples,
giving testimony to Congress a few weeks ago that Taliban resurgence now
presents "a greater threat to the Afghan central government's expansion of
authority than at any point since late 2001."
To be sure, occupied Iraq is useful to al Qaeda and its ilk - as a
recruiting poster. In this and myriad other ways, the United States military's
continued heavy-handed presence in Iraq strengthens the hands of extremists
and demagogues who can appeal to latent Iraqi nationalism and Muslim pride.
Yet we seem to have forgotten that terrorists don't really need Iraq as "a
safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks against our nation," as Bush
put it - they are just as likely to be drawn from countries that are
nominally our allies, such as the 15 hijackers recruited under the noses of
the Bush family's sheikh friends in Saudi Arabia.
Finally, for old times sake, Bush trotted out his now hoary excuses for
those missing Iraqi WMD he so trumped up to get us psyched for a
"pre-emptive" war three years ago, again blaming the deception on everyone
except himself. "Like you, I asked that very same question, 'Where did we go
wrong on intelligence?'." he plaintively responded to his questioner. "The
truth of the matter is that the whole world thought that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction."
Not so, most of the world thought it best to wait for the U.N. inspectors,
then on the ground in Iraq, to complete their work before answering that
question. Those inspectors had found no such evidence of WMD and this
president knew full well that would likely be their final conclusion when he
ordered the pre-emptive invasion. Yet he justified it by referring to the
Sept. 11, 2001, attack warning, "We cannot wait for the final proof - the
smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that a treasure trove of
translations of audio tapes of top-level Iraqi meetings involving Hussein,
released at the request of U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chairman
of the House Intelligence Committee, show that Iraq destroyed its WMD
program by 1992. Those tapes were obtained soon after the 2003 invasion, yet
the Bush administration kept them secret while continuing to assert that
Iraq had an active WMD program.
As opposed to ordinary people in this country and the world, Bush has access
to the same detailed information that the Sept. 11 commission used to
conclude that the terrorist acts of Sept. 11 and others conducted by al
Qaeda bore no relation to Iraq. It is hardly an advertisement for American
democracy that he has been able to operate before the war and as recently as
this week as if the truth will never be allowed to hold him accountable -
though not in Cleveland, which is something to cheer about.
See more of Robert Scheer at Truthdig.com
© 2006 TruthDig.com, LLC
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http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0322-30.htm
Bush's problem is he doesn't know when to shut up or when to stop lying.
Ch-impeach!
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