Misleader
It’s important that you take a look at my extended entry today folks. My thanks to The Whiskey Bar for compiling this list of quotes on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction claims by Bush Administration officials.
These are not ambiguous quotes. These are quotes full of complete certainty. Then how can it be that just the other day our chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay contradicted all that we’ve been told by this administration? His conclusion:
“My summary view, based on what I’ve seen, is that we’re very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons. I don’t think they exist.”
So how did this happen? I see three, and only three possibilities here.
The first is that the intelligence given to the president was conclusive. It said that Iraq currently possessed weapons of mass destruction and was targeting the United States. But that’s not what the intelligence summaries said based on information known and published even before the war started. They were clear that the information was partial and sketchy, and that the findings should not be used to draw any definitive conclusions. Intelligence agencies actually disputed each other on numerous point. The State Department was in particular skeptical of claims made by other intelligence agencies.
The second possibility is that the American people and our Congress were lied to by our Administration. This is possible but unlikely. Although this is one very arrogant administration, it’s hard to imagine if the administration knew that intelligence this poor it would still make these pronouncements as fact when it knew them to be wrong.
The third and most likely reason was that intelligence was read selectively. Evidence supporting Bush’s predisposition to invade Iraq was deemed credible. That which offered a different point of view was dismissed. This is quite plausible former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, in his recent book, made it clear that the administration had plans to topple Saddam Hussein even before 9/11. It was also the entire point of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s personal intelligence office. It was instructed to find the evidence that supported toppling Saddam, and to ignore the rest.
Ultimately though the reason doesn’t matter. In the first case simply did not happen. The intelligence summaries provided to the press prove it. In the second case we have clear grounds for Bush’s impeachment and removal from office. In the last case we have the most egregious case of misleadership imaginable.
Thus far over 500 American soldiers have died in our preemptive and unnecessary war in Iraq. We already have over $150B either spent or allocated to fighting and occupying Iraq, and doubtless the number will continue to climb in the years ahead. Conservatively at least 9000 people, mostly Iraqis have died in this war. Over five thousand of our soldiers have been wounded. Our armed forces are spread thin and occupy a country that had no connection with 9/11.
We fought the wrong war at the wrong time. We actually made our country more vulnerable to terrorism because we diverted forces away from those responsible for 9/11: al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. And if that were not enough we managed to squander most of our good will with other countries.
I can think of nothing a president can do that is worse than sending off our armed forces to start and fight the wrong war. For such widespread misleadership alone George W. Bush must not be reelected.
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