It's hard to believe how loudly these same people screamed when President Clinton proved himself a master of equivocation. They certainly didn't hesitate to call Bill Clinton a liar for saying he didn't have sex with that woman. It all rested on a legalistic question of what sex is, or, as Clinton said, what the definition of
is is.
In my book, that made Bill Clinton a liar. In my book, Richard Perle is no less a liar. However, Clinton's lies about love were a comma in the page of history, while the lies of Perle, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and others about war are of great moment.
Perle knows very well that not
all the intelligence suggested that Saddam was in possession of WMDs, as Mr. Perle asserts. Evidence to the contrary was simply ignored and suppressed. In many arguments with Bush apologists over at the the website of
The Nation, I would lay out the that Bush and his lieutenants are lairs. Those defending Bush would try to answer all the points except one. They would always ignore the charge that Doug Feith was manipulating intelligence in the Pentagon.
As for not hearing statements to the effect that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, Perle is technically correct. Statement by the regime spokesmen were carefully parsed to say "September 11" and "Saddam" in the same sentence, over and over again, leaving the impression that they were making that charge, when in fact they came just short of it. For example, in his letter of March 18, 2003 notifying Congress that military hostilities against Iraq had begun, Mr. Bush said:
(A)cting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Nowhere does Mr. Bush say that his action is against al Qaida, just people like them. It doesn't say that Saddam had anything to do with the September 11 attacks, just that he has some kind of relationship with people like al Qaida, but not necessarily al Qaida.
If one goes back and read any statement by Bush or any of his aides and reads it, one will find that all of there statements contained the same careful parsing. Never is there a flat statement that Saddam is associated with al Qaida, which would have been that natural way to say if that what was meant. This kind of care in the use of language can only come with planning and discipline. It was planned to give people like Perle deniability years later. It is deliberate equivocation, deliberate deception. That the same careful language was used by so many at the same time to sell the public on a war whose justification rested on dubious assertions of facts that turned out to be universally false cannot be coincidence. It is conspiracy.
Where I come from, that kind of deception falls under the category of lying every bit as much as a blow job falls under the category of sex. Mr. Perle can only make that statement because he is relying on a unique definition of
is.
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