A Time for Change

Bush’s farewell legacy tour is in full swing now, although the shoe incident has temporarily derailed it.  But he and his minions are openly and obviously attempting to re-write history before our eyes as if we are incapable of remembering what they told us.  On the tour, Bush, Rove, Rice and Cheney are blaming mid-level CIA for the Iraq war rather than take responsibility for the decisions that they made and the representations that they made. I suppose it is much easier to blame someone else.

Maybe the American people will be susceptible to this revisionist history. Maybe they’re right, some people insist that there was no holocaust.  But Bush and his merry band are on tape as they lie, squirm and wriggle about the basis for the Iraq war (or lack thereof).

The latest excuse for his total incompetence of taking the US into a voluntary war and diverting resources from the hunt for Osama bin Laden is that he got some bad intelligence from Iraq.  Does he forget that while the rest of the world was doing its best to try to stave off his crusade against Saddam Hussein that inspectors never found any evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)?

At best Bush is responsible for not making sure there was a bona fide basis for that war.  At worse, Bush lied, Rice lied, Cheney lied and even Colin Powell lied.  The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote in an Op-Ed piece,

The president’s attempt to disassociate himself from accountability for the phony pretext for war is simply outrageous. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were not just two guys in a crowd of “a lot of people” who were worried about Hussein’s weapons capability. They were elevating the hysteria about Iraq at a time when some of this nation’s most important allies were openly skeptical of U.S. claims of Hussein’s weapons cache and capabilities. The Bush administration was sounding alarms – such as Rice’s January 2003 suggestion that ceding to uncertainty might cause the “smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” – even though U.N. inspectors were coming up empty.

Most infamously, Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address included the 16 words claiming that Hussein had tried to obtain “significant quantities” of uranium, even though red flags had been raised within the State Department about the veracity of the claims. 

There is a Senate Report that details all of Bush’s lies and those of his cohorts.  It can be found here.     Report of the Senate Committee On Intelligence – IRAQ.

If you read it, you will see for yourself that  there was no intelligence indicating Iraq’s intention of supplying al Qaeda with any weapons of mass destruction. But this claim was repeatedly made by President Bush (“Iraq has longstanding ties to terrorist groups which are capable of, and willing to, deliver weapons of mass destruction”), Vice President Cheney (“[T]he war on terror will not be won ’till Iraq is completely and verifiably deprived of weapons of mass destruction”), and others such as Secretary of Defense Powell and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.  This constant assertion that al Qaeda and Iraq worked hand-in-hand made it possible for President Bush to announce in his March 17, 2003 “Address to the Nation” that “with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.”

The Senate Report shows that on the subject of Iraq’s nuclear weapon’s program President Bush and Vice President Cheney again fabricated, but this time not as starkly. Rather than issuing announcements that had no basis whatsoever in existing intelligence, they revised the intelligence community’s picture by exaggeration and omission.

The misguided war in Iraq was founded on a fraud perpetrated on the trusting and vulnerable American people.  After the 9/11 attacks, Americans looked for a leader to “fix” the terror issue and make them safe again.  Bush failed.  

His preemptive war in Iraq has practically driven the American people into the ground economically and has fallen far short of being a success.  Over 5 years after the war began and trillions of dollars later, Obama will end the war and clean up Bush’s mess.  

To understand why an Iraqi threw shoes at Bush and why Iraqis are demonstrating against Bush in the streets based on that incident, consider this:  1.2million Iraqi killed in violence related attacks between the 2003 invasion and September 2007.  Compare that to the Human Rights Watch estimate of 250,000 to 290,000 killed during the 25 year term of Saddam Hussein.

The San Francisco Chronicle  also recounts some of the other revisionist spin in which Bush is engaging:

In another exit interview, Bush continued to defend the decision to go to war and argued that he has left Iraq on solid footing for his successor. He even claimed it improved U.S. relations with many foreign nations – a highly dubious contention.

The Chronicle was being nice.  No one can seriously contest that our relations with other nations and the people who inhabit them has been damaged by the phony war.  Our country no longer has the luster that it once had because of Bush and his neocon cronies.

Terrorism in the world is rising, not declining.  The terrorist acts are also becoming more and more grand.  The underground in London. Trains in Spain. Hotels in Mumbai.  

Almost from the day that Bush took office, his particular brand of foreign policy was to flex his muscle to coerce our allies to support us.  His cowboy foreign diplomacy was either “you are with us or against us.”  This childlike cowboys and indians approach to a complex world had  was completely ineffective.

The war in Afghanistan is thus far a failure.  Osama bin Laden is still running around free. The Taliban are gaining more and more influence with the Afghan people. Why?  After 7 years of quasi-occupation of their country, America has failed to keep its promises of providing an infrastructure and assisting with enabling Afghans to come up with an economy that is not based on drugs.

7 years after Bush started the war in Afghanistan,  it is significant that Time magazine contains an article entitled, “The Aimless War: Why Are We in Afghanistan?”  Violence is escalating and thereby put our troops at greater risk. Time said of the war that it “has become an aimless absurdity.”

It began with a specific target. Afghanistan was where Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lived, harbored by the Islamic extremist Taliban government. But the enemy escaped into Pakistan, and for the past seven years, Afghanistan has been a slow bleed against an array of mostly indigenous narco-jihadi-tribal guerrilla forces that we continue to call the “Taliban.” These ragtag bands are funded by opium profits and led by assorted religious extremists and druglords, many of whom have safe havens in Pakistan.”

The Bush-backed Karzai government appear to be just drug lords who are primarily interested in governing for the money they get from peddling half the world’s opium supply.  The Bush administration allowed Bin Laden to escape so, Time asks, what are we doing there?  Good question.

Pakistan is yet another George W. Bush failure.  Time reports that this is where bin Laden now lives, if he lives.

The far more serious problem is Pakistan, a flimsy state with illogical borders, nuclear weapons and a mortal religious enmity toward India, its neighbor to the south. Pakistan is where bin Laden now lives, if he lives. The Bush Administration chose to coddle Pakistan’s military leadership, which promised to help in the fight against al-Qaeda — but it hasn’t helped much, although there are signs that the fragile new government of President Asif Ali Zardari may be more cooperative. Still, the Pakistani intelligence service helped create the Taliban and other Islamic extremist groups — including the terrorists who attacked Mumbai — as a way of keeping India at bay, and Pakistan continues to protect the Afghan Taliban in Quetta. In his initial statements, Obama has seemed more sophisticated about Afghanistan than Bush. In an interview with me in late October, Obama said Afghanistan should be seen as part of a regional problem, and he suggested that he might dispatch a special envoy, perhaps Bill Clinton, to work on the Indo-Afghan-Pakistani dilemma. 

They have been so busy with Iraq, that Afghanistan and Pakistan have been left to fester.  Britain’s Prime Minister just went to Pakistan out of great concern that intelligence shows that all major terror attacks are emanating from Pakistan.

So, George, Dick and Condi, pardon me for not feeling grateful.  In most parts of the world, you are all considered war criminals and you have sullied the US in the process.

“History will not forget that the rationale for this war – which has brought so much death, debt and misery – was thoroughly discredited. The fault for that cannot be delegated to mid-level intelligence analysts. It rests with the president.”

Ditto for all of your other failures Mr. Bush.  After all, you were the “decider.”