Lean Left

Bush the Liar

by Kevin

March 28th, 2006

More evidence that Bush was lying about his actions in the lead up to the war:

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

“Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

“The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.”

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.

Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.

… The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq.

We should perhaps be grateful; Mr. Bush devolved from the merely deceitful to the clinically insane before the meeting was over:

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

It also described the president as saying, “The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s W.M.D,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

Bush wanted his war so bad that he was willing to stage attacks and produce people to lie on cue. On that second point, one has to wonder how any can trust the Bush Administration’s contention that they did nothing to distort the evidence they used to go to war. But that, actually, is a small issue.

At the time of this meeting, and forever afterwards, Bush and Blair insisted that the war was an option of last resort, that it would depend upon Saddam’s cooperation. In fact, right after this meeting took place, the two had a press conference where they said the following:

THE PRESIDENT: Saddam Hussein is not disarming. He is a danger to the world. He must disarm. And that’s why I have constantly said and the Prime Minister has constantly said this issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months….

… THE PRESIDENT: Let’s see if I can be polite. Saddam Hussein has had 12 years to learn how to deceive, and I would view this as more deception on his part. He expects to be able to convince 108 inspectors that he is open-minded. The only way that he can show that he is truly a peaceful man is to not negotiate with inspectors, is not to string the inspectors along, but to disarm in front of inspectors.

We know what a disarmed regime looks like. We know what it means to disarm. There’s no negotiations. The idea of calling inspectors in to negotiate is a charade. If he is going to disarm, he must start disarming. That’s the only thing he needs to talk to the inspectors about, is, here, I’m disarming.

That was a lie as the memo now shows. They were going to have their war, reality be dammed. The inspectors were in Iraq, they were finding the Iraqis remarkably co-operative, and Iraq was being shown to be a paper tiger without the risks that invasion entailed. Bush had actually managed to achieve a real, tangible victory. Yet he threw it away in order to force his pet war. And he played the American people for chumps while doing so.

What Bush did is poison to a democracy. He went before the American people and said that the invasion was necessary because Saddam was a threat who was not complying with the international community’s instructions to disarm. But he knew that Saddam had disarmed, or, at least, had never rebuilt his arms, and he knew that he was going to invade even if Saddam was shown to be a hollow threat. He lied to the American people about the most important issue a President can lie about: going to war. He refused the American public the chance to debate the merits of toppling Saddam based on reality. He short circuited the democratic process, using lies to cover up the fact that he was going to do what he wanted to do whatever he had told the American public. The public ultimatum was disarm or be invaded, but Bush had already settled on invaded.

This cannot be supported. To back Bush now is to argue that the democratic process does not matter and should not matter. If you think that Bush should not be held accountable for this deliberate manipulation then you are arguing that it is okay for the President to lie about his actions, his motives, and his intentions to get the public to do what he wants them to do. That is not how democratic debate is supposed to operate. Approving of Bush’s methods is approval of the notion that the President should be followed unquestionably and that he or she is justified in doing anything, saying anything, betraying any trust with the American people to do as he or she wishes. That is not the attitude of a citizen. It is the attitude of a serf.

Categories: Iraq, Politics |