March 28, 2006 at 23:00:00

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Which Soldier Will Be The Last To Die For Bush's Mistake?

By Evelyn Pringle (about the author)     Page 3 of 4 page(s)

opednews.com     Permalink

These are his words. Bush said Saddam is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Has he ever produced any evidence to back up this allegation? No. And, his rhetoric continued that day in the Rose Garden, where he said:

"The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX – nerve gas – or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally."

And yet, 3 years later, we have not seen a shred of evidence to support this claim of grave dangers, chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.

Four days before a vote on the resolution, on October 7, 2002, Bush ramped up the scare tactics and stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy – the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade."

Bush then went even further by saying: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

During his speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center, he also elaborated on Iraq's nuclear program and said:

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' - his nuclear holy warriors.... If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."

This is the kind of outrageous rhetoric that was given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped fabricated evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote on October 11, 2002.

And most importantly these are examples of the same kind charges that the Bush administration now tries to say were never made, like we're deluded idiots.

Saddam is no longer in power. But in reality, so what? The Iraqis are worse off. They still don't even have the basic necessities of life like clean water, sanitation provisions, and electricity. They've had to watch family members imprisoned, tortured, and killed for 3 years without Saddam in charge.

And our soldiers are still dying in record numbers. Not a day goes by that there is not another attack on the troops who are saddled with trying to restore order to a country on the brink of anarchy.

Bush told the American people that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave threat. Are we safer today than we were on March 18, 2003?

For the first time in history, the US went to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a grave threat to our nation. We should accept nothing less than a full-scale, wide-open Congressional investigation into the issue of pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq.

It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq to determine once and for all whether the intelligence was faulty or distorted.

The purpose of such an investigation is not to engage in "revisionist history." It is to get at the truth. The American people have valid questions that deserve to be answered.

By Evelyn Pringle
evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net

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