President Bush either has all the gall in the world or he is completely out of it. In his Nov. 11 speech, in an ill-conceived attempt to shore up his plummeting poll ratings, he charged that his critics have been distorting the facts and rewriting history about the Iraq war.
Bush, a world champion fact-distorter and history-rewriter himself, first justified his war in Iraq with numerous lies. He and his advisors' misstatements included the following: "Imminent threat." "Produced thousands of tons of chemical agents." "Fear a Mushroom cloud." "We found the weapons of mass destruction." "Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa." "Iraq terrorist ties." When these lies didn't pan out, Bush switched his reason for war to "the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein".
Concerning the non-existent WMD's, he blamed faulty intelligence, but it was intelligence he purposely initiated himself. He installed the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon to cherry-pick and embellish findings supportive of war in Iraq while debunking whatever that wasn't. This group resorted to taking info out of context and juxtaposing unrelated data. Meanwhile, the real intelligence community repeatedly warned that the WMD case was weak.
The sorry truth is the war was in the works as far back as 1998. Then, a 'Neo Con' group, including Bush's Vice President, Sec. of Defense, former Asst. Sec. of Defense and brother Jeb Bush, lobbied Congress and President Clinton. They called for a more aggressive foreign policy in which an already weakened Iraq would be conquered and colonized to become a sphere of U.S. military dominance with four U.S. bases in the oil rich Middle East. Furthermore, both former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former terrorism czar Richard Clarke revealed that Bush was planning to attack Iraq from the first days of his administration.
Actually, President Bush should now be facing Congress and explaining why he lied to them about the Iraq War.
