[Mb-civic] MUST READ: Iraq and the 'L' Word - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Iraq and the 'L' Word

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; Page A29

Along with such creations as American POWs still being held in Vietnam 
and the Bill Clinton drug-smuggling operation at a remote Arkansas air 
strip, the unhinged right wing has now invented the myth that Democratic 
members of Congress have called President Bush "a liar" about Iraq. An 
extensive computer search by myself and a Post researcher can come up 
with no such accusation. That's prudent. After all, it's not clear if 
Bush lied about Iraq or was merely the "useful idiot" of those who did.

The term "useful idiot" is not a reflection of IQ. I resurrect it from 
the Cold War days when anticommunists used it to contemptuously describe 
certain communist sympathizers. I think sometimes the phrase probably 
went through the dark mind of Vice President Cheney and certain other 
Bush administration officials who must have known that their dear 
president was exaggerating the case for war. Cheney, for one, is too 
smart and too calculating not to have known that the envelope was being 
pushed past the point of verifiable truth.

In fact, the man who just recently took a McCarthyite swipe at 
Democratic war critics had no equal in exaggerating Saddam Hussein's 
(nonexistent) nuclear weapons program. In just one month -- August 2002 
-- Cheney repeatedly warned of its imminent danger. The first time, he 
said that if Hussein was "left to his own devices, it's the judgment of 
many of us that in the not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear 
weapons." Later that month he described Hussein as a "sworn enemy of our 
country," adding that he constituted a "mortal threat" to the United 
States. "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire 
nuclear weapons," the vice president also said that month. "Among other 
sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, 
including Saddam's own son-in-law."

But as a Post story by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus from August 2003 
makes clear, Cheney could not have known what he said he knew. In the 
first place, Hussein's son-in-law was dead, killed in 1996 when he made 
the dubious career move of returning to Iraq. What's more, when Hussein 
Kamel was still a defector and being debriefed in Jordan, he said he had 
no knowledge of a current nuclear weapons program. Iraq's uranium 
enrichment program -- a prerequisite for a weapons program -- had been 
dormant since the Gulf War in 1991.

This was typical Cheney -- and, to a lesser extent, Condi Rice and other 
members of the Bush administration. Their incessant references to 
"mushroom clouds" or "nuclear blackmail" might have at one time been 
understandable -- although still a huge, irresponsible reach. But well 
before the war began, it was becoming clear that Saddam Hussein had not 
a nuclear weapon to his name. The program that United Nations and other 
inspectors had stumbled on after the Gulf War -- the program that 
surprised U.S. officials and encouraged them to believe that Hussein 
could hide anything -- had by then been proved to no longer exist. U.N. 
inspectors simply could find no evidence of it -- and neither could 
anyone else. As the prime reason for war, a nuclear weapons program had 
no basis in fact.

What is both amazing and appalling about Bush is that he seems not to 
care. The way things look now, he will go down in history as an amiable 
dunce -- Clark Clifford's scathing and misapplied characterization of 
Ronald Reagan -- who took his country to war for reasons that did not 
exist. This is a blunder without peer in American history and possibly 
an assault on democracy: The people, through their representatives, are 
supposed to make an informed decision about war. It is incredible to me 
that Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about sex, but nobody -- 
that's nobody -- in the entire Bush administration has been fired, not 
to mention impeached, for this shedding of American blood. Cheney, a man 
of ugly intolerance for dissent, should have been the first to go. His 
has been a miserable, dishonest performance -- which he continues to 
this day.

The restraint of responsible war critics has been remarkable. Despite a 
recent headline on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- "What If 
People Start Believing That 'Bush Lied'?" -- the "L" word has been 
prudently withheld by elected Democrats. But you would think that Bush 
himself would wonder about how he's gotten to this place where he looks 
like such a fool: wrong on the biggest issue of his presidency. He went 
out there and told the American people things that were not true. Does 
that mean he lied? Maybe not. Maybe he was just repeating the lies of 
others.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/21/AR2005112101233.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051122/ea75171b/attachment.htm