[Mb-civic] Bush's magnificent deception - Thomas Oliphant - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Bush's magnificent deception

By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist  |  November 15, 2005

WASHINGTON
JUST FOR the record, the polling numbers President Bush claims not to 
read show the following with regard to the run-up to the invasion of 
Iraq in 2003:

According to The Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey last week, 57 
percent of the sample believe Bush deliberately misled the country on 
the way to war, more than 20 points above the numbers asserting he was 
straight with the country.

In denying the charge, however, it is fascinating that the White House 
spin machine has avoided giving examples of its nuanced rhetoric on the 
subject of the alleged threat posed by Iraq at the time in order to make 
its case to a skeptical public. That's because there aren't any.

Instead, there has been an entertaining chorus of claims that the charge 
is false but that everybody else did it -- other countries' intelligence 
services, assorted politicians in this country (especially Democrats). 
Lacking a defense, Bush's operatives have sought to construct a Potemkin 
universe of intelligence dupes.

In this blizzard of disinformation, though, the unique nature of Bush 
and his top advisers is conveniently overlooked. Everyone else in the 
world with the possible exception of Tony Blair recognizes the corollary 
to the now-accepted wisdom that Iraq possessed no unconventional weapons 
and posed no threat to the United States worthy of adjectives like 
grave, imminent, or even serious.

The corollary would be that knowing then what is known now, an 
essentially unilateral invasion of Iraq under conditions of haste and 
waste in March of 2003 would have been ill-advised in the extreme. 
Virtually alone in the world, Bush has proclaimed for months that he 
would have invaded Iraq even if he had known it posed no threat.

Leaving aside that defiant position, Bush most nearly resembles some of 
the Iraqi architects of this magnificent deception. We have Senator 
Edward M. Kennedy to thank for the following gem from the 
administration's once heralded exile, Ahmed Chalabi, gloating a year 
after the invasion he did so much to provoke:

''We are heroes in error," Chalabi proclaimed at a time when the 
post-invasion chaos had long since evolved into full-fledged, murderous 
insurgency. ''As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. 
That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was 
said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a 
scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords, if he wants."

Actually, he didn't want. Last week Chalabi was back here, haunting the 
same corridors he used to dispense false junk about WMDs. He's still 
very alive in the interim Iraqi government, still with more than a 
little US backing, conspiring to link relatively secular Shi'ite pols 
with Kurdish elements to gain a foothold in the parliament that will be 
chosen next month. Bygones apparently are bygones.

But not in American politics. All last week, Republicans in the House 
and Senate, the Republicans National Committee, and finally Bush himself 
in a tacky and intemperate misuse of a Veterans Day platform, took aim 
at critics because they believed the thrust of intelligence reports they 
therefore supported his deliberately misleading use of them.

In his speech, Bush took aim at Senator John Kerry, and in a statement, 
his White House went after Kennedy, who days before had spoken out on 
the Chalabi visit. It was intriguing how desperately Bush clung to the 
fiction that Kerry had once been a soul brother.

Quoting him as saying before the war resolution vote in 2002 that his 
authorization assumed a ''deadly arsenal" glides past Kerry's criticism 
of the ''rush to war" before the invasion and his later assertion that 
he would not have voted ''yes" if the full truth were known. Bush also 
ignored the incorrect belief of many that while chemical and possibly 
biological weapons probably existed, the case for a nuclear weapons 
program was flimsy, and yet it was that case that Bush and his advisers 
emphasized because it tested better in their polling of voters.

As for Kennedy, the White House ignored his position on the 2002 
resolution, which included an endorsement of a UN resolution far tougher 
than the one Colin Powell negotiated in November 2002. One of the grand 
''what ifs" of this period is whether Saddam could have survived a 
finding by a small army of weapons inspectors that one of his holds on 
power -- the belief that he had unconventional weapons -- was a complete 
fiction.

The White House hysteria last week reflects its fear of the kind of 
thorough probe of the use of data that the Senate Intelligence Committee 
is now pledged to conduct. That is all the more reason for that probe to 
proceed.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/15/bushs_magnificent_deception/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051115/7ddadb1c/attachment.htm