Fool Us Once
You know the old saying, “Fool us once, shame on you, fool us twice, shame on us”. With that in mind, one would hope that voters in the US presidential election think very carefully about the core issue in this campaign – did the current administration purposefully, even willingly, construct a false case in support of attacking Iraq? The New York Times has put together a useful examination of this subject.
In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb “fairly soon.” The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had “irrefutable evidence” – thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.
The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the administration’s brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein’s revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,” Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the government’s foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets.
The most compelling information within the article is that the top experts in the entire world – the US’s own experts, the so-called “A” Team, quite easily was able to concluded that the tubes in question were not designed to be used for nuclear weapons use, and this assessment was available to Condoleeza Rice and the US administration before 9/11. They knew the information they based their case to attack Iraq on was completely bogus and they used the horror of 9/11 to lie to the people and do it anyway.
Like many people, I was willing to support direct action against Iraq if the action was justified. My preference was for an international coaltion supported by the UN to take such action, not a unilateral decision. I quite clearly remember telling my wife how my support would spin 180 degrees around should it be proved that Bush government was lieing to the people.
Since then, with each passing month its become abundantly clear to all but the most blind that there was no justification for a unilateral attack on Iraq. Not then. What’s most important is that Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz and other conservative neaderthals knew this, but did it anyway.
In a post 9/11 environment it was easy for people to be swayed by dishonest government; what the people need to do today is punish those who took advantage of a scared public to foist their misguided, and illegal, policies on to the peoples of the world.
The article – How the White House Embraced Disputed Iraqi Arms Intelligence – is worth reading in its entirety.