[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Nuclear Fiction

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Nuclear Fiction

October 10, 2004
 By MAUREEN DOWD 



 

When W. debated Al Gore, it was the Insufficient versus the
Insufferable. 

When W. debated John Kerry, it was the Obfuscating versus
the Oscillating. 

We face a choice now between a president who rolled us on
Iraq and a senator who got rolled by the president on Iraq.


George Bush is not giving an inch on Iraq. He's toughing
out the cascade of confirmation and criticism from his own
people about the hyperpower hyperbole that led to an
unnecessary war and an unruly occupation. His advisers say
it's better for the president to appear out of touch than
apologetic. He'd rather seem delusional than deluded. 

He can't admit what the Duelfer report says, that Saddam
was no threat to the U.S. or any other country. The
mushroom cloud was a Fig Newton of Dick Cheney's feverish
imagination. That would mean W. didn't fix his father's
screw-up, but he screwed up his father's fix. A big Oedipal
oops. 

After Bush 41's Persian Gulf war, Saddam devolved into the
Norma Desmond of vicious dictators, shrinking but
pretending to still be big, writing romance novels, trying
to order liposuction machines, teeth-whitening material and
hair transplant equipment, soaking up American culture like
his favorite song, Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the
Night,'' and his favorite book, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old
Man and the Sea." 

The president may not have gotten his money's worth with
the report of Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons
inspector. After all, in a vain retroactive attempt to
justify his hokum about W.M.D., he had 1,200 people working
for 15 months - stretching our scarce supply of Arab
linguists - to produce 918 pages at a cost of about a
billion dollars just to find out that Saddam would have
liked to have had weapons if he could have, but he
couldn't, so he didn't. 

But at least for his billion, the president got some
earnest Introduction to American Literature analysis of the
Iraqi dictator and his taste for some Western culture,
noting that Saddam felt a kinship with Hemingway's
protagonist Santiago, the poor Cuban fisherman (even though
the rich Saddam liked to grenade-fish - toss a grenade in
the water and then send in scuba divers to fetch the dead
fish). 

"Saddam's affinity for Hemingway's story is understandable,
given the former president's background, rise to power,
conception of himself and Hemingway's use of a rustic
setting similar to Tikrit to express timeless themes," the
report stated. "In Hemingway's story, Santiago hooks a
great marlin, which drags his boat out to sea. When the
marlin finally dies, Santiago fights a losing battle to
defend his prize from sharks, which reduce the great fish,
by the time he returns to his village, to a skeleton. The
story sheds light on Saddam's view of the world and his
place in it. ... to Saddam even a hollow victory was by his
reckoning a real one." 

Even though his own report stated that U.N. sanctions had
worked to defang Saddam, Mr. Bush decided to stand firm on
nonsense, insisting in the debate Friday night that
"sanctions were not working. The United Nations was not
effective at removing Saddam Hussein." 

When a questioner named Linda asked the president to give
three bum decisions he had made in office, Mr. Bush took a
pass. Lincoln could admit mistakes. J.F.K. could admit
mistakes. But W. thinks admitting mistakes is for powder
puffs. Of his decision to invade Iraq, he said: "Sometimes
in this world you make unpopular decisions because you
think they're right." Or you stick to them even after you
know they're wrong. 



The president's living in a dream world. He kept insisting
that 75 percent of Al Qaeda has been "brought to justice,"
even though such a statistic is misleading, since
counterterrorism experts say that the invasion of Iraq was
a recruiting boon for Osama and that Al Qaeda has
metastasized and spawned other terrorist groups. 

Mr. Bush tried to pretend the devastating Duelfer report
backed him up, noting after the report came out that Saddam
"retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the
intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and could
have passed this knowledge to our terrorist enemies." 

W. should have followed his father's policy on
hypotheticals. As Poppy Bush would say, when someone asked
him to be speculative: "If a frog had wings, it wouldn't
bump its tail on the ground." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/opinion/10dowd.html?ex=1098426767&ei=1&en=09478cf4e9675090


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