A Web Tour of Bush Lies on Iraq

By Rod Driver

April 26, 2008

Providence Journal, April 21, 2008

 

SOME 33 PERCENT of Americans, according to polls, and most in Congress still support President Bush’s war in Iraq.

And I can’t blame them if they lack Internet access and depend on the mainstream media for news. They may still be unaware that (1) George Bush and his friends wanted war with Iraq years before 9/11 and (2) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

If you don’t have Internet access, please visit a library and go to the Web site of “The Project for a New American Century” ( www.newamericancentury.org). Still displayed there are letters written in early 1998 to then-President Clinton and congressional leaders urging U.S. “willingness to undertake military action” against Iraq. The letters were signed by Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, William Bennett, John Bolton, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey and others who would come to power with George W. Bush three years later.

Upon first taking office, in January 2001, President Bush immediately sought reasons to attack Iraq ( www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-09-02-WMD-indepth_x.htm).

And one year after the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001 — with all but one of the hijackers being from Saudi Arabia —- George Bush started saying “Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.” Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and others made similar statements dozens of times.

The “marketing” of this “new product” — as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card put it — succeeded beyond Bush’s wildest dreams. Soon 70 percent of Americans believed that Iraq had attacked us. Among American troops in Iraq, 85 percent thought they were there to avenge 9/11.

Virtually unnoticed were Bush’s confessions (starting Sept. 17, 2003) that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. On Aug. 21, 2006 — after four years of persuading Americans to blame Iraq — Bush made the mind-boggling statement: “Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.”

These statements are all on the White House Web site ( www.whitehouse.gov). Click on “more news.” Then scroll to the desired date for transcripts and videos.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice also invented another “reason” for attacking Iraq. On Aug. 26, 2002, Dick Cheney ominously declared “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. . . . He is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

On Oct. 7, 2002, Bush warned of “the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Bush and Condoleezza Rice considered this metaphor (by speechwriter Michael Gerson) so clever that they kept repeating it.

On Jan, 28, 2003, Bush solemnly proclaimed, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” (Rice later said it was a “mistake” to use those words. Three months earlier the CIA had warned that the statement was based on crudely forged “documents.”)

On Feb. 5, 2003, Colin Powell gave an elaborate show-and-tell at the U.N. about Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. (Today Powell calls the speech “a blot” on his record. It depended on “information” from an alcoholic informer called “Curveball,” a confession extracted by torture from an Iraqi prisoner and a student’s thesis found on the Internet.)

On March 30, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld asserted, “We know where they [WMD] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat” ( www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?tra-nscriptid=2185).

One year later, when no WMD were found, Bush made jokes about it at a correspondents’ dinner ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKX6luiMINQ&fe-ature=related).

On Aug. 21, 2006, Bush skipped the jokes and admitted that there were no WMD.

(Except as noted, these speeches too are found on the White House Web site.)

Bush’s war of aggression has lasted longer than American involvement in World War II, and could eventually cost $3 trillion.

Under George Bush the death toll in Iraq may already exceed the combined totals of 800,000 in the Rwanda genocide and 200,000 in Darfur.

It may even surpass the Iraqi death toll under Bill Clinton. Just three years into Clinton’s first term it was already estimated that half a million Iraqi children had died — mostly from diseases caused by drinking polluted water. (Clinton would not let Iraq buy parts to properly repair the sewage-treatment and water-purification plants destroyed by U.S. bombs in 1991.) When asked about it on May 12, 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did not dispute the half-million-children-dead estimate. She explained “We think the price is worth it.” ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_Qsh-S2EW8).

After World War II we hanged Nazis for crimes against humanity. And John McCain reminds us that we hanged Japanese for waterboarding American prisoners.

But our media don’t say a word about the fact that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rumsfeld and colleagues have not been arrested for crimes against humanity — nor even investigated for possible impeachment. The media and Congress are more interested in the misdeeds of Martha Stewart, Marion Jones, Roger Clemens and Eliot Spitzer.

The two Rhode Island Democrats overwhelmingly re-elected to the House in 2006 don’t dare support an impeachment investigation (nor much of anything else) without permission from Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a custom they learned while in the Rhode Island General Assembly.

Rod Driver is a retired University of Rhode Island mathematics professor and a former state representative.