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Bush obfuscations may sink him
We have just witnessed a defining moment of this yearâs American presidential election. Rather than helping George W. Bush, as the pundits have it, his hour-long televised interview last Sunday will haunt him, so laced was it with falsehoods and impregnated with questions. If you add his other recent pronouncements, and those of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others, it becomes clear that the administration has decided not to come clean on the invasion of Iraq. It is going to tough it out. That guarantees a continuation of the ever-shifting rationale on why about 16,000 Iraqis and 525 Americans are dead, so far.As self-defeating as the strategy may be for the Republicans, it will benefit the American body politic. The election can now be about what it should be: Bushâs integrity and judgment in waging a unilateral war on false premises, thereby squandering the most precious commodity of an American president abroad â legitimacy. The justification for the war has come down to intent â Saddam Husseinâs, as surmised by Bush. That, plus a series of suppositions. Saddam "could have developed a nuclear weapon over time," said Bush, in his Meet The Press interview. The dictator "had the capacity to make a weapon." In lockstep, George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, intoned: Iraq had "intended to reconstitute its nuclear program." It had "intended to develop biological weapons." It had "the intent and the capability to convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production." The obfuscations are a far cry from the pre-war certitude about Iraqi weapons aimed right at America, and represents a retrenchment even from the recent assertions about Saddamâs "weapons programs," and his "weapons-related program activities." On the embarrassing reality that no weapons have been unearthed, the administration is offering two explanations: Rumsfeld: That weapons have not been found does not mean that they are not there. They could be found in a hole, just as Saddam was."They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered Iraq. They could have been hidden. They could have been transferred to another country." If the weapons were as lethal as Bush said they were, how could they have been destroyed safely and without leaving a trace? Bush has also backpedalled, in two subtle ways, on his pre-war charge that Iraq was linked to Osama bin Laden. He said Sunday Saddam could have let a lethal weapon "fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network." So, itâs not Al Qaeda any longer. Second, Bush twice cited Saddamâs "paying for suicide bombers," a reference to his practice of helping the family of Palestinian suicide bombers. But Iraq was not invaded in the name of punishing Saddam for aiding anti-Israeli terrorism but because his alleged terrorist links ostensibly threatened America. All these are clear markers for Americans to see how far their president has moved from what he told them before the war. Bush has done something even more useful. Until now, he had tended to blame flawed pre-war intelligence and not discuss his own faulty policy. But on Sunday, he owned up to the latter and expanded on the beliefs that drive his doctrine of pre-emptive wars. The post-9/11 world is a dangerous place, he said, and he, as "a war president," must whack the bad guys before they whack America. Saddam was "dangerous with weapons," "dangerous with the ability to make weapons," and was "a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world." Hence the invasion. That skips over three details: Saddam was not linked to 9/11; he posed little or no danger to the U.S. and the decision to topple him had been made long before that day. Bush gave two more justifications for the war. "I donât think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. Itâs too late if they become imminent." That prompted this question by a letter writer to the editor of The New York Times: "Is there a country we couldnât attack with this policy?" Bush also argued that "containment doesnât work with a man who is a madman. Remember, he had used weapons against his own people." The same point was made by Rumsfeld to a meeting of NATO ministers last week. "Think about what was going on in Iraq a year ago with people being tortured, rape rooms, mass graves, gross corruption, a country that has used chemical weapons against its own people." But last year was not when Saddamâs cruelties were at their peak, as Human Rights Watch noted last week. It was in the 1980s when he used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds and Iranians. That was the time he was Americaâs ally. Rumsfeld himself visited him in Baghdad in 1983 as an envoy of Ronald Reagan and presented the dictator with a pair of golden spurs. Bush has written the script for the election campaign far better than the Democrats could ever have. Posted by: Rob Perbowski 2004-02-12 |
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