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WMDoublespeak "Iraq had a weapons program... Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced, with time, we'll find out that they did have a weapons program." That was President Bush on Monday, doing his best to brush aside the growing chorus of critics openly asking why the US has been unable to find the biological and chemical arms it invaded Iraq to dispose of. But those critics aren't going away, and the administration's attempts to soften its rhetoric and change the subject don't seem to be working. Even Republicans on Capitol Hill are backpedaling, and now both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee will begin closed-door hearings to review the administration's intelligence on Iraq. Of course, the Republican chairmen of the two committees are doing their best to low-ball the hearings -- they will be far less than the joint formal inquiry still being sought by many Democrats. Just about everybody assumes that news will leak beyond the closed doors of the Senate hearing rooms, but the approach is still unlikely to satisfy Jules Witcover. The venerable Baltimore Sun columnist quips that, "in a few short months, President Bush has turned from being Paul Revere on the 'imminent threat' of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction into a patient teacher of recent history." http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.witcover11jun11,0,6142 81.column?coll=bal-oped-headlines Not buying revisionist sales job on Iraqi weapons Jules Witcover But nobody argues that Iraq had such weapons in the past, Witcover reminds us. "So the pertinent question has always been whether, as the Bush administration insisted in launching the invasion, those weapons were in hand and so ready for use as to constitute a clear and present danger requiring immediate military action. Mr. Bush's latest expressions of conviction that the Iraqis had a 'weapons program' seemed a distinction and a hedge from his earlier statement on Polish television that 'we found the weapons of mass destruction.' His reference was to the two mobile facilities suspected of being capable of producing deadly chemical or biological agents. With reporters parsing his words as if he were Bill Clinton playing semantic games over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer found it necessary to say that Mr. Bush, 'in saying programs, also applies to weapons,' and 'that includes everything knowable up to the opening shots of the war.' In the absence of the discovery of such weapons, however, the president is now actively engaged in low-balling the WMD rationale for the war. In saying that history will conclude he made the 'absolute right decision' in invading Iraq, he is substituting Iraqi 'liberation' as his justification, itself a somewhat premature self-congratulation in light of the continued turmoil in the conquered country, including more U.S. military casualties." The editorial page editors at the San Francisco Chronicle will also probably find the senators' closed-door approach unsatisfactory. In an editorial, the Chronicle argues that any such inquiry "must be vigorous and independent. The credibility of the Bush administration is at stake." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003 /06/10/ED143232.DTL Was Iraq war built on hype? "The Bush administration should be held accountable for its stated rationale for the war to oust Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The president and his top aides need to explain, to the satisfaction of an increasingly skeptical Congress and American public, their use of seemingly ambiguous and possibly dubious intelligence reports in building their case for war. ... The war has certainly turned up abundant evidence that Hussein was a murderous tyrant who pillaged his country's oil wealth. But that point was never in doubt. The Bush administration went much further before the war, arguing that Hussein had the terrorist connections and the lethal means to pose a looming threat to the United States that could only be extinguished with a massive pre-emptive military attack." Witcover and the Chronicle speak, rather diplomatically, of the president's credibility. Richard Gwynn of the Toronto Star at least puts it another way -- using the language most on the left are unafraid to employ. But Gwynn still gives the White House the benefit of the doubt -- claiming that there is not reason yet to brand Bush and his administration as "outright liars." http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout /Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1052251799774&call_pageid=968256290204&co l=968350116795 Bush's weapons of mass deception "We are dealing with something less than lying but also something a good deal more than an honest mistake. At best, Bush and aides such as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell may have been guilty of believing what they wanted to believe. They wanted to depose Saddam Hussein and believed, genuinely, that his downfall could lead to a fundamental transformation of the Middle East. It would include the negotiation of a peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the development of democracy in Iraq that could function as an alternative regional role model to Islamic militancy and terrorism. ... To achieve it, Bush seized on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because it was politically saleable to the U.N. and to the American public. At the same time, officials, in agencies like the CIA, tailored analyses, as bureaucrats often do, to suit the needs of their superiors. This is the best-case analysis of what has happened. The worst-case analysis is a lot worse. This is that there has been sustained deception, exaggeration and manipulation." John Prados, writing on TomPaine.com, pretty much embraces that worst-case scenario. Comparing the administration to "a band of street hustlers hawking their three-card monte," http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8035 Hoodwinked Prados argues that Washington has been constantly, if subtly, altering its arguments for war. Now, Prados writes, "Americans are beginning to realize they have been duped by a president in whom they have instilled immense trust." "The administration's cleverness would be fascinating were it not so insidious, not so destructive of America's position in the world. In rapid succession we were told that: U.S. inspectors cannot find the weapons because looters carried away the evidence; Saddam had too long to hide them; that we never expected to find evidence; that the administration never claimed Iraq actually had such weapons. First it was supposed to be just a matter of time, then it was maybe because Saddam destroyed them." Even war party pundits are starting to feel the heat -- if only indirectly. D.J. Tice, writing in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, insists that US invasion was still justified. Tice at least acknowledges that the president has a problem, but he believes it's simply a communication problem. Bush is in trouble, Tice argues, because he "has recoiled from explaining his policy plainly." http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/news/opinion/6057466.htm "It certainly seems possible that Bush and company overstated, if not what they believed to be the case about WMDs, then at least how central the threat of such weapons was to their reasons for invading Iraq. It seems quite possible that the real reasons were 1. that the United States needed to decisively demonstrate its resolve to crush its enemies and 2. that Saddam was a brutal, trouble-making tyrant whose demise hardly anyone in the world would really regret. The administration, it seems, couldn't figure out how to make this case. So it leaned heavily on the threat of doomsday weapons, something much closer to a conventional motive for war. In the process, it ran the risk that the weapons would not be there. Fact is, a lack of candor has accounted for most of the administration's problems in justifying the war with Iraq. Bush began, early in 2002, persistently claiming he had not made up his mind about attacking Saddam, which probably wasn't true, and anyway wasn't widely believed. Then he behaved, for a time, as if it was of decisive importance that America won United Nations approval for an attack, which also wasn't the case. Sometimes the oldest platitudes are the best guides. Honesty is the best policy, even (sometimes) while making war. Had he displayed greater candor about his decision to oust Saddam, Bush would have less of a credibility problem today." Still, diminished presidential credibility may ultimately not be what derails Washington's unchecked global ambitions. While the most hawkish of Washington's pundit hawks would love to see the Bush administration truly go it alone, the Financial Times sensibly suggests that "the most significant consequences for Mr Bush could come not from what happens in Washington but what happens in London." http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullS tory&c=StoryFT&cid=1054965958676&p=1012571727162 WMD dispute highlights transatlantic differences Even if Bush can dodge the post-war intelligence questions, his administration has likely lost its only significant ally. "Ivo Daalder, a former White House director of European affairs now at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, said failure to find WMD in Iraq would simply bolster UK opponents of the war who said there was no imminent threat. That would make it far more difficult for Britain to support future US military actions. 'This has nothing to do with Washington. It has everything to do with what the US can do in the future abroad,' he said. 'It was the strength of Tony Blair's own personality and the credibility he had within his party that allowed him to go to war. And that's gone.'" >http://www.house.gov/reform/min/pdfs_108/pdf_inves/pdf_admin_iraq_nuc >lear_evidence_june_10_let.pdf > >June 10, 2003 > >The Honorable Condoleezza Rice >Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs >The White House >Washington, DC 20500 > > >Dear Dr. Rice: > > Since March 17, 2003, I have been trying without success to get >a direct answer to one simple question: Why did President Bush cite >forged evidence about Iraq's nuclear capabilities in his State of >the Union address? <snip> ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get A Free Psychic Reading! 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