Toronto Star : America, swept to war on a lie.

[Tripper11]

President George Bush left no fear unstirred as he made the case for war with Iraq.

Saddam Hussein posed "a grave threat to peace," he told a Cincinnati audience five months before the Marines landed.

Saddam had "an arsenal of terror," Bush insisted. He "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons . . . is seeking nuclear weapons. . . ."

His schemes "threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons."

And Americans "cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush warned, sounding an apocalyptic note.

This alarmist indictment steeled Americans for a war that would take 8,500 Iraqi lives, cost close to $100 billion, and strain relations with most of the world.

Yet Bush now stands exposed as a spinner of untruths and half-truths, knowingly or not, as the public loses faith in his ability to manage foreign policy — a strength he hoped to parlay into re-election next year.

A majority of Americans now feel the country is on the wrong track, Bush is stumbling on foreign policy and the economy, and the Iraq war wasn't worth it.

Toronto Star

[Brucey]

1. Thank you, Canada!

Wish I lived there!

[Skittles]

2. AND SOME OF US AMERICANS

WERE NEVER FOOLED BY THIS PIECE OF SHIT LYING "PRESIDENT".

[izzie]

3. We have been crewing the rug on this for months.

Bush is sure not going to give up and out comes news lies dayly.

[pansypoo53219]

4. yes

we of that 15% who never were blinded by 9/11.

[Sticky]

5. Anybody see Eric Margolis on Hardball last night?

He writes for the Toronto Sun.

He called bush a "liar" .... finally, someone has said it!

[SeveneightyWhoa]

6. And how did Matthews treat him?

THAT would've been fun to see. How did Chris Matthews respond to him?

[Sticky]

8. Chris Matthews

Gave most of the time allotted to Jed Babbin, the pro-bush guy. Eric interrupted frequently and you'd swear the stuff he was saying came directly from the posters here.

An excerpt:

MATTHEWS: Let me go to Eric first. Eric, what does the failure of David Kay to find weapons of mass destruction tell you?
ERIC MARGOLIS, “WAR AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD” AUTHOR: Well, it tells me that the U.S. waged an unprovoked and illegal war under international law against Iraq.
It means that President Bush and his advisors misled the country into war, which greatly damaged America’s reputation around the world, and ignited a hornet’s nest of anti-American feeling around the world.
And third, it was a war fought, created by propaganda. And we’re seeing now that all these lurid arms that were supposed to be there were not. This is another Whitewater investigation, writ large.
MATTHEWS: Let’s go right now for the other point of view. Jed Babbin, what does the failure of David Kay’s team to find weapons of mass destruction tell you?

Later when disagreeing with a point Babin made:

MARGOLIS: I can’t believe in the light of events, sir, of what have happened that you would cling to these old chestnuts that remind me of Soviet era propaganda. The germ weapons, let me remind you, that Iraq used in the war against Iran were supplied by the United States.

The full transcript is here and it's great! (Scoll halfway down the page)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/978127.asp

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. Babbin may have got more time

but it looks like that was bacause Matthews thought he had more to answer for. I've never seen Matthews, and most posters here seem to hate him, but he did sum up like this:
"My vote is the police officer is not allowed to shoot a guy who’s thinking about going to buy a gun. He can only shoot him if he raises his arm and goes for the gun."
which I agree with whole-heartedly.

[pvokac]

7. Canada went to war in WW2 two years before we did...

to protect the British Empire.

Was THAT effort worth it?

Of course it was, but nowadays their memory is short, and their world-view is provincial.

[Skittles]

10. OMG

you need help

[JohnyCanuck]

12. Hitler had the most up todate and powerful military in the world

at the start of WWII.

Saddam didn't have shit with which to wage war as was clearly demonstrated by the quick collapse of his army and his inability to deploy his non-existent WMD. Furthermore the neighboring countries around Iraq did not consider Saddam a threat and were in the proces of re-opening trade ties and establishing diplomatic relations etc. with Iraq. Finally we have the word of Houseboy Colin Powell in 2001 assuring an audience in Egypt that the sanctions against Saddam had worked and his capacity to manufature WMD effectively curtailed. He indicated that Saddam was no threat to his neigbors. Condisleeza Rice echoed the same sentiments later on that year in a TV interview.

The US intentionally exagerated the threat that Saddam posed not because they were interested in liberating Iraqis from a dictator or because they felt there was any danger of Saddam selling a suitcase nuke to Osama for him to set off in LA or New York, but because the neo-cons who put the useful (to them) idiot Bush in office and who were his advisors (Cheney, Rumfseld, Perle, Wofowitz, Rove etc) had long been proposing that the US use its military to establish a world hegemony so that no other country or alliance would have an opportunity to become a rival to the US in economic or military might.

This is NOT conspiracy theory. For further information on the neo-con way of thinking and their publicly stated plans to establish a global Pax Americana where the world is ruled from Washington DC with the help of compliant allies and puppets try finding out more about the neo-con think tank Project for a New American Century, or PNAC for short. Coincidentally just about all the members of Bush's circle of advisors are members of PNAC or are members of similiar neo-con think tanks and organizations. You can find info PNAC here www.pnacrevealed.com or go to PNAC's own web site www.newamericancentury.org and look for the document "Rebuilding America's Defenses."


A key part of the PNAC strategy involves planting US bases throught the Middle East to control the energy resources of the region and to ensure that the US would be in as powerful a position as possible in the coming years as the world comes to rely more and more heavily on the Middle Eastern oil fields to supply the need for energy. Whoever control's Middle East oil will have a very effective means of controlling the economies of possible future rivals to the US, eg. the EU, China and India, who will all become more and more dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

This is especially true as there are more and more signs that the world oil production could be peaking much sooner than originally anticipated and that event will place even more urgency on the neo-cons to assert their control of Middle Eastern oil which remain the last large scale reserves of easily accessible, high quality crude. See these websites www.dieoff.org http://www.hubbertpeak.com/summary.htm www.peakoil.net and this articleThe Background is Oil, also this interview with Geologist Colin Campbell PhD.

FTW: What will be the likely effects of hitting the downslope of production?

Campbell: Big question. Simply stated: war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens, insofar as the evolution of life on earth has always been accomplished by the extinction of over-adapted species (when their environmental niche changed for geologic or climatic reasons) leaving simpler forms to continue, and eventually giving rise new more adapted species. If Homo sapiens figures out how to move back to simplicity, he will be the first to do so.

FTW: How soon before we start to feel the effects of dwindling oil supplies?

Campbell: We already are -- in the form of the threatened U.S. invasion of the Middle East. The U.S. would be importing 90 percent of its oil by 2020 to hold even current demand and access to foreign oil has long been officially declared a vital national interest justifying military intervention. Probable actual physical shortage of all liquid hydrocarbons worldwide won't appear for about 20 years, especially if deepening recession holds down demand. But people are coming to appreciate that peak is imminent and what it means. Some places like the U.S. will face shortage sooner than others. The price is likely to soar as shortage looms, which itself may delay peak.


Edited to correct spelling and to add a quote and a link to an article Summarizing the PNAC document Rebuilding America's Defenses.

From http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3249.htm quoting the PNAC document Rebuilding America's Defenses:

In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semi-permanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security.While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein" (p. 14).
My emphasis JC.

Within the above article is a link to the complete PNAC document in pdf format.

[dutchdemocrat]

11. The Globe and Mail is better - OP-ED written by publisher of Harpers.

John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, calls for impeachment

In Canada's national newspaper at that... The Globe and Mail is Canada's NYT.

Impeach Bush now

Unmasking a CIA agent is bad, lying to Congress worse. With each U.S. death in Iraq, the case against the President grows stronger, says JOHN MacARTHUR

By JOHN MacARTHUR
From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Now that the U.S. government's chief weapons inspector in Iraq has, in effect, confirmed an obvious truth -- that President George W. Bush and his closest advisers promoted a non-existent nuclear and chemical weapons threat from Iraq to justify a war -- an obvious question presents itself: Why aren't Americans talking seriously about impeachment?

After all, Mr. Bush now stands plausibly accused of the lofty crime of subverting the Constitution of the United States -- that is, lying to Congress about an imminent danger to the American people in order to collect enough votes to authorize his corporate/imperial project in Iraq. Yet, outside of a few brave remarks from Senator Robert Graham, and the considered opinion of Watergate stool pigeon John W. Dean, almost nobody dares speak the "I" word.

Is the notion really so preposterous? Reasonable people can disagree about the "intent" of the founding fathers when they wrote the clause that states that "the president . . . shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors."

But one doesn't need to be a constitutional scholar to interpret the meaning of a civil covenant that leaves plenty of room for political manoeuvre.

Indeed, the genius of James Madison and his colleagues lay not so much in their literal specificity, but in their deliberate ambiguity. Depending on the era and circumstances, one man's high crime is Bill Clinton lying about sex with Monica Lewinsky in front of a grand jury; another's is Richard Nixon's involvement in (and lying about) the Watergate burglary cover up. Lately, my idea of a high crime is lying to Congress, before the authorization for war was voted last Oct. 11 -- a time when the administration was touting an atomic bomb threat from embargo-starved Baghdad.


SNIP

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031009.maca09/BNStory/International/