Sarge
03-25-2004, 01:31 PM
PIN THE TALE ON THE DONKEY
By Ted Rall
Desperate, Bush Blames Democrats for Iraq (news - web sites)
Ted Rall
Related Links
• Ted Rall's Editorial Cartoons
NEW YORK--One year, 570 fallen American soldiers and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis later, the widespread realization that the war against Iraq is a failure is reducing George W. Bush's popularity to that of raw liver. Were the election to be held today, the latest Washington Post poll finds, John Kerry (news - web sites) would kick his skinny illegitimate ass all the way back to Crawford--and that's before the coming six months of job losses.
The numerous excuses the White House used to justify the invasion--a "grave" and "gathering" threat posed by Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, planting the seed of democracy in the Middle East, avenging September 11---have all been belied by subsequent events. Now, as Slaughtergate crumbles down upon them, top administration prevaricators are mounting one final line of defense: the ridiculous claim that everyone believed the war was a splendid idea.
"The question was," spins the hopelessly compromised Colin Powell (news - web sites), "did they have stockpiles or not? And we all thought they had stockpiles, not because we wished it. The evidence suggested that they had stockpiles. And so we may not find the stockpiles. They may not exist any longer. But let's not suggest that somehow we knew this."
"I wasn't giving the world bad information," Powell asserted in a separate interview with state-controlled Fox News. "I was giving the world the information that we had at the time we had it."
Actually, we didn't "all" think Iraq had stockpiles of dangerous weapons "at the time." Quite the opposite: most people thought it didn't. And Powell thought the "information" he gave the world was, in his own words, "bullshit." At the time.
Three top Bush officials in a position to know the truth--chief counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and CIA (news - web sites) director George Tenet--call Powell a liar. In fact, say these pissed-off conservatives, the American intelligence establishment agreed that there was no proof that Iraq possessed WMDs after 1998. And that's what they told Bush. Getting rid of Saddam, CIA analysts additionally warned White House hawks in 2002 and early 2003, would likely lead to stubborn resistance. They predicted that Iraq would become a recruitment tool for Al Qaeda and other militant groups.
Bush, of course, ignored them.
Talk about chutzpah! The Bushies not only brushed off the CIA analyses--"wrong answer," Clarke says the White House replied when it bounced back his report denying ties between Saddam and 9-11--now they're blaming their mistakes on "faulty intelligence."
Pundits, including yours truly, published hundreds of columns and essays noting the lack of evidence that Iraq had WMDs while describing in eerily prescient detail what would go wrong in Iraq. Now, say occupation watchers, the lack of a strong central government could cause sectarian violence to devolve into full-fledged civil war by this summer. Energy analysts see gas prices rising as high as $3 per gallon. I predicted both developments in a July 30, 2002 column titled "Gulf War (news - web sites) Two." Ditto for the dangerous impact of war in Iraq on the war on terrorism: "Why give radical anti-American Islamists even more political ammunition with which to recruit suicide bombers and attract the financial donations that fund their assaults?" I asked. Referring to the botched precedent of Afghanistan (news - web sites), I wrote in October 2002, we had no chance of success in Iraq: "We won the war but we lost the peace. Will we do the same thing in Iraq? Count on it."
Liberals weren't the only skeptics. Months before bombs began falling on Baghdad, with Bush's popularity rating still hovering around 80 percent, the overwhelming majority of ordinary citizens, including Republicans, nevertheless disagreed with his desire to invade Iraq. According to a December 15, 2002 Los Angeles Times poll, 72 percent of the American people said that such a war would be totally unjustified. In the biggest demonstrations since the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched through the streets of New York, San Francisco and dozens of other cities to urge a bellicose Administration to back down. Ignoring the demonstrators' statements that they didn't believe Iraq had WMDs, Bush's henchmen derided them as hippie retreads and kneejerk pacifists. History doesn't record what Bush thought of that 72 percent majority.
The world beyond our borders, so solicitous and generous after 9-11, stood shoulder to shoulder against the war. Between 1 and 3 million people marched in Rome, half a million in Berlin, 300,000 in Paris. With the exception of Great Britain, the governments of every major industrialized nation refused to provide military or diplomatic support due to the absence of firm evidence of Iraqi WMDs. So we went it alone, unless you count Bulgaria and Fiji.
Democratic Senators, liberal writers, the United Nations (news - web sites), former arms inspectors--they all said that invading Iraq was stupid and unjustifiable. Now that everyone else has been proven right, Mr. Bush, feel free to lie and dissemble--God knows we're used to it--but don't you dare try to stick us with the blame for your screw-up.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&ncid=742&e=7&u=/uclicktext/20040325/cm_ucru/pinthetaleonthedonkey
By Ted Rall
Desperate, Bush Blames Democrats for Iraq (news - web sites)
Ted Rall
Related Links
• Ted Rall's Editorial Cartoons
NEW YORK--One year, 570 fallen American soldiers and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis later, the widespread realization that the war against Iraq is a failure is reducing George W. Bush's popularity to that of raw liver. Were the election to be held today, the latest Washington Post poll finds, John Kerry (news - web sites) would kick his skinny illegitimate ass all the way back to Crawford--and that's before the coming six months of job losses.
The numerous excuses the White House used to justify the invasion--a "grave" and "gathering" threat posed by Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, planting the seed of democracy in the Middle East, avenging September 11---have all been belied by subsequent events. Now, as Slaughtergate crumbles down upon them, top administration prevaricators are mounting one final line of defense: the ridiculous claim that everyone believed the war was a splendid idea.
"The question was," spins the hopelessly compromised Colin Powell (news - web sites), "did they have stockpiles or not? And we all thought they had stockpiles, not because we wished it. The evidence suggested that they had stockpiles. And so we may not find the stockpiles. They may not exist any longer. But let's not suggest that somehow we knew this."
"I wasn't giving the world bad information," Powell asserted in a separate interview with state-controlled Fox News. "I was giving the world the information that we had at the time we had it."
Actually, we didn't "all" think Iraq had stockpiles of dangerous weapons "at the time." Quite the opposite: most people thought it didn't. And Powell thought the "information" he gave the world was, in his own words, "bullshit." At the time.
Three top Bush officials in a position to know the truth--chief counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and CIA (news - web sites) director George Tenet--call Powell a liar. In fact, say these pissed-off conservatives, the American intelligence establishment agreed that there was no proof that Iraq possessed WMDs after 1998. And that's what they told Bush. Getting rid of Saddam, CIA analysts additionally warned White House hawks in 2002 and early 2003, would likely lead to stubborn resistance. They predicted that Iraq would become a recruitment tool for Al Qaeda and other militant groups.
Bush, of course, ignored them.
Talk about chutzpah! The Bushies not only brushed off the CIA analyses--"wrong answer," Clarke says the White House replied when it bounced back his report denying ties between Saddam and 9-11--now they're blaming their mistakes on "faulty intelligence."
Pundits, including yours truly, published hundreds of columns and essays noting the lack of evidence that Iraq had WMDs while describing in eerily prescient detail what would go wrong in Iraq. Now, say occupation watchers, the lack of a strong central government could cause sectarian violence to devolve into full-fledged civil war by this summer. Energy analysts see gas prices rising as high as $3 per gallon. I predicted both developments in a July 30, 2002 column titled "Gulf War (news - web sites) Two." Ditto for the dangerous impact of war in Iraq on the war on terrorism: "Why give radical anti-American Islamists even more political ammunition with which to recruit suicide bombers and attract the financial donations that fund their assaults?" I asked. Referring to the botched precedent of Afghanistan (news - web sites), I wrote in October 2002, we had no chance of success in Iraq: "We won the war but we lost the peace. Will we do the same thing in Iraq? Count on it."
Liberals weren't the only skeptics. Months before bombs began falling on Baghdad, with Bush's popularity rating still hovering around 80 percent, the overwhelming majority of ordinary citizens, including Republicans, nevertheless disagreed with his desire to invade Iraq. According to a December 15, 2002 Los Angeles Times poll, 72 percent of the American people said that such a war would be totally unjustified. In the biggest demonstrations since the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched through the streets of New York, San Francisco and dozens of other cities to urge a bellicose Administration to back down. Ignoring the demonstrators' statements that they didn't believe Iraq had WMDs, Bush's henchmen derided them as hippie retreads and kneejerk pacifists. History doesn't record what Bush thought of that 72 percent majority.
The world beyond our borders, so solicitous and generous after 9-11, stood shoulder to shoulder against the war. Between 1 and 3 million people marched in Rome, half a million in Berlin, 300,000 in Paris. With the exception of Great Britain, the governments of every major industrialized nation refused to provide military or diplomatic support due to the absence of firm evidence of Iraqi WMDs. So we went it alone, unless you count Bulgaria and Fiji.
Democratic Senators, liberal writers, the United Nations (news - web sites), former arms inspectors--they all said that invading Iraq was stupid and unjustifiable. Now that everyone else has been proven right, Mr. Bush, feel free to lie and dissemble--God knows we're used to it--but don't you dare try to stick us with the blame for your screw-up.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&ncid=742&e=7&u=/uclicktext/20040325/cm_ucru/pinthetaleonthedonkey