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To: zonder who wrote (157311)	5/16/2003 8:11:22 AM
From: re3	Respond to of 164684

'Hillbilly in the White House: Bush attack on Iraq 'handy'' Thursday, May 15 @ 09:54:17 EDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By John McFerrin, Charleston Gazette When Granny Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies got riled up about something, she would routinely whirl and kick Jethro in the shins. Since he hadn't done anything, he would always ask, "What you kicking me for?" Her reply always was, "'Cause I'm mad and you're handy." Enter George W. Bush. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush was all riled up. A group made up mostly of citizens of Saudi Arabia under the leadership of Osama bin Laden (another Saudi) operating out of Afghanistan had attacked the United States. President Bush first tried bombing Afghanistan but he never could find bin Laden. He couldn't very well attack Saudi Arabia, even if it is a widely known source of funding for terrorism groups and the home of most of the 9/11 hijackers. Saudi Arabia has too much oil, which it is willing to produce and sell in ways that serve the economic interests of the United States and American oil companies. The solution? Saddam Hussein. He was plenty handy because of his long record as a dictator. He had a rinky-dink military that couldn't put up any real resistance. The riled-up George Bush could kick him in the shins, bomb his country to smithereens, whatever. Saddam hadn't done anything to cause the 9/11 attack, but Bush was mad and he was handy. The difficulty with this is that Bush is the leader of the free world, head of the only superpower, and has his finger on the nuclear button. He can't very well appear to take his decision-making model from a little hillbilly woman from a 1960s television show. He has to do better than that. His solution to that little difficulty was to make up and keep telling a colossal lie. From the time of the attacks, his speeches on the subject always mentioned both al-Qaida (which carried out the attack) and Saddam Hussein (who didn't) in the same paragraph. He did this over and over so that by the time of the bombing of Iraq, polls showed that close to half of the American people thought that Saddam was directly responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11. Having managed to fool half the people just by constantly mentioning Saddam and al-Qaida together, President Bush became bolder in his colossal lie. When he stood on the aircraft carrier to brag about winning the war, he referred to Saddam as an "ally of al-Qaida." The truth is that President Bush tried for months before the war started to find a link between al-Qaida and Iraq. He couldn't do it. The CIA can't find a link; Army intelligence can't find a link. There is no evidence that any link exists. The connection is implausible because of the nature of the organizations involved. Like the United States, Iraq under Saddam was a secular state. Just as the United States is ruled by people who happen to be Christian, Iraq was ruled by people who happen to be Muslim. The church and the state were, however, separate. Saddam may have been a tyrant but he was a military man, not a religious leader. In contrast, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida are Islamists. They want states where the church is the government and rules according to church teaching. Osama publicly condemned Iraq as it existed under Saddam for being secular. President Bush must have overlooked this when he referred to Saddam and al-Qaida as allies. In a democracy such as ours, leaders must at least appear to do something in response to things that concern the people. The attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon scared people. President Bush had to do something. President Bush could have done something effective in addressing the problem. He could have re-examined American actions to determine which of our policies make people hate us so. He could have done the dull but necessary work to improve our ability to analyze intelligence so that we could avoid future attacks. Information to predict 9/11 was apparently available in bits and pieces from multiple sources. While putting all this together well enough to predict the attacks would have been a difficult task, we didn't have any system that could even attempt it. He could have worked at making us all safer from future attacks. He could have spent more energy tracking down the ones who actually did sponsor the attacks. None of this, however, is as dramatic or exciting as rallying the nation for a war. Since there wasn't any evidence that Saddam had anything to do with the attacks, he had to make some up. Over 100 dead Americans, a few billion dollars, and a few thousand dead Iraqis later, he could announce that we had clobbered an "ally" of al-Qaida. He still would not have done anything against anybody who had anything to do with the attacks of Sept. 11 and would have done nothing to make future attacks less likely. As long as he could peddle the lie that Saddam had something to do with the attacks, however, he would have given the appearance of doing something effective. In American politics, that is often enough. So there we have it. We may have a president who, when riled, will strike at whatever is handy. We may have one who is willing to make up a colossal lie and then spend lives and treasure doing something that, because of the big lie, looks like an effective response when it really isn't. Neither of these is reassuring when that president is the leader of the free world, head of the only superpower, with his finger on the nuclear button. McFerrin, a Beckley lawyer, is one of the Gazette's contributing columnists. Reprinted from The Charleston Gazette: wvgazette.com