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Bush Administration continues to Evade, Mislead, and Spin on War in Iraq

Constance Lavender

OpEdNews.com

According to the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (2nd Edition, 1956)  "intelligence" is defined as:

 

1. the power or act of understanding; intellect or mind in operation; also, mental acuteness or sagacity;

 

2. the power of meeting any situation, esp. a novel situation, successfully by proper behavior adjustments; also, the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal;

 

3. information, news, advice;

 

4. the obtaining or dispensing of information, particularly secret information...

 

In the fall of 2002 and into the winter of 2002-2003, the administration of George W. Bush presented a case for a premptive, unproked attack and invasion upon another sovereign nation run by a two-bit dictator and thug, Saddam Hussein.

 

Mr. Bush made his case to the Congress, the American people, indeed, the world, based on intelligence that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to US security interests. After this preordained  war had commenced, and it became clear that the single most powerful reason for attacking Iraq was untrue, the rationale for invasion slipped from an "imminent" to a "gathering" to a now "grave" threat. This evolving rationale, this after-the-fact justification, quid pro quo, this linguistic turn from the implication of immediate harm to today's grave danger is disturbing at best and intentionally fallacious at worst.

 

The only more surprising issue concerning this faulty, mistakenly premised, war is that the administration is still attempting to defend its actions with regard to Iraq. The president himself, based on his debate performance last week, still needs some convincing. The war had no connection to terrorism, Saddam Hussein was no imminent threat, and diverting resources and military assets to Iraq has detracted from the legitimate war on international terrorist organizations and has destabilized an already teetering global region.

 

From the facts leading up to the war to the messy aftermath, from the global multilateral war on terror to the unilateral world-be-damned invasion of Iraq, the president has baited-and-switched, mislead, rationalized, and finally plead for support all along the way.

 

Dick Cheney is still looking for WMD. Condoleeza Rice again attempted to rationalize the indefensible premption in Iraq on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulis (Sunday, October 3, 2004). The president stammered and hemmed and hawed during his muddled, confused, and irritated apearance with Senator John Kerry at the University of Miami last week.

 

Any way you look at it..........Iraq was not about terrorism nor has it made the USA safer.

 

The most serious and unnerving issues surrounding the Iraqi invasion have to do with the president himself.

 

After 9/11 the country, indeed the world, was unified.

 

After Iraq, the country is sharply polarized, the USA is held in historic disregard, and our moral credibility abroad is splintered.

 

The problems that led to the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States were intelligence failures. Failures of imagination by those employed to be imaginativem, or at least farsighted, when it comes to predicting future events based on intelligence: information existing here and now.

 

Yet, the president only reluctantly agreed to the creation of the 9/11 commission, has embraced their recommendations with a lukewarm reception, and has acted on only one or tweo of the forty some recommendations put forward by the commission to improve intelligence gathering and security operations.

 

If intelligence is the power or act of understanding, intelligence in this administration, at least so far as Iraq is concerned, is plain absent. Their is no more understanding of the administrative, intelligence, and policy failures leading to the invasion of Iraq today, then when the White House was misleading the country into war basedc on faulty intelligence over a year ago.

 

And what's also disturbing is that Mr. Bush has not shown any evidence of the power to meet this novel situation with proper behavior adjustments to account for those intelligence failures and to compensate for the lack of adequate prewar planning. Instead he stubbornly insists on the righteousness of his untenable doctrine of preemption cawing about liberation and freedom. If freedom and liberation is the goal, Mr. Bush, stop the genocide----the slaughter of innocents----going on right now in the Sudan.

 

Mr. Bush has had four years to reform intelligence gathering and improve accuracy. He was jolted into recognizing the problem of intelligence failure after 9/11. And yet this president made yet another poor choice based on fallacious, tenuous intelligence to start another war.

 

Can we afford a third strike?

 

Constance Lavender is a freelance e-journalist from Galloway, New Jersey Contracted HIV in the 1980s, Widowed in the 1990s, Now your Humble Servant in the 21st Century. Interested in Communications Technology in the Age of Information & Knowledge, Ms. Lavender is a Correspondent who believes A Free Country Is Premised On A Free Press. In the best spirit of Benj. Franklin and Silence Dogood, I have committed myself to constantly responding to the spin of mainstream journalism and corporate news.