Bush Should Have Listened Instead

[Larkspur]

Hartford Courant
http://www.ctnow.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-williams0925.artsep25,1,6262935.story?coll=hc-headlines-oped

Although there was a sigh of relief that George W. Bush was not announcing a new crusade against Iraq the way he did from the same podium last year, his speech to the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday was as wooden as we have come to expect, leading to unkind thoughts. (Wouldn't it be fun if the teleprompter froze!)

Of course, no one was expecting him to apologize for getting it wrong. But you would never guess from his speech that the weapons inspectors he sent to scour Iraq have not found a single working weapon of mass destruction, nor that the Iraqi scientists they have interviewed concur that the weapons were actually destroyed when Saddam Hussein said they were.

The president did not mention that the war he fought "for the credibility of the United Nations" was opposed by the overwhelming majority of U.N. members, nor that he has since refused to let the United Nation's own weapons inspectors return to Iraq even though the whole campaign against Iraq a year ago was based on Saddam's refusal to let them in.

Instead, the president declared, "The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction." This is, as Winston Churchill said when parliamentary etiquette forbade him to say that a colleague had lied, "a terminological inexactitude." There is no doubt that Saddam used terror against his own people on a huge scale - at times with the support of President Bush's father. There is no evidence whatsoever, as Bush himself admitted a week ago, that Saddam was behind Sept. 11, even if the administration has somehow persuaded a large majority of the American public that he was. It took the U.S. destruction of the tightly controlled Iraqi police state to make the country a haven for the world's terrorists.
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