TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2006
Groundhog Day in America
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2. On May 1, 2003, standing in front of the Mission Accomplished banner, he stated: "The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th...With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."
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That's a sampling. Bush also said yesterday, "I don't want to be argumentative...I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on 9/11." True, as far is it goes; Bush never used the word "ordered." But there was a reason why 42 percent of Americans still believed, shortly before the '04 election, that Hussein had financed and planned the 9/11 attacks. It was because the administration implied and suggested it, by the artful phrasings it employed, and never dissuaded Americans from connecting those errant dots.
Bush also insisted today: "I didn't want war." That, too, is contradicted by the factual record.
Time magazine reported in March 2003 that one year before the war, Bush had poked his head into a White House room and told three senators, "(Expletive) Saddam, we're taking him out." And on July 23, 2002, long before Bush went to the United Nations, his British allies met with him and subsequently wrote, in the now-famous Downing Street memos, that Bush "had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided." Neither the Time anecdote, nor the British memos, have been disputed by the White House.The hunger for competing voices is now endemic in Washington (a development that Bush dismisses out of hand; he said today that "Washington is a great town for advice"). How else to explain the
news that Congress has now established a bipartisan group of prominent people to study the war with "fresh eyes" and propose new future policies?
more...
http://dickpolman.blogspot.com/2006/03/groundhog-day-in-america.htmlHow did the U.S. end up taking on Saddam? The inside story of how Iraq jumped to the top of Bush's agenda -- and why the outcome there may foreshadow a different world order
"F___ Saddam. we're taking him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Snip…
The meeting was relatively uneventful, though Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister, said a military strike against Iraq would make fighting terrorism more difficult. But at the press conference afterward, de Villepin dropped his bomb. France, he said, thought that "nothing justifies envisaging military action."
It was the plainest signal possible that so long as the inspectors were getting cooperation from Saddam, Paris would not support a war.Though it was not clear at the time, the attempt to build a unified international position on Iraq died that day. Everything that followed--the gnomic reports by Hans Blix, the U.N.'s chief biochemical-weapons inspector; Powell's presentation of new intelligence on Saddam's WMD capabilities; increasingly frantic British efforts to forge a new resolution that might win a majority of the Council--was no more than flowers on the coffin of Resolution 1441.
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But only one nation--the U.S.--has suffered the thousands of deaths that a few people with a deep hatred could inflict.
"I do think 9/11 is a historic watershed," Cheney told NBC News last week. The U.S., he said, was worried that the next attack on its territory "could involve far deadlier weapons than the world has ever seen. The rest of the world hasn't had to come to grips with that yet." That is true. It is also true that Iraq is not the only nation that either has such deadly weapons or would like to get them.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/24/timep.saddam.tm/index.html
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