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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (19976)	6/4/2003 3:32:33 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Why the truth is so elusive in Iraq _________________________________ By Steve Chapman Columnist The Chicago Tribune Published June 1, 2003 chicagotribune.com President Bush is such an admirer of Winston Churchill that he keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office. You don't have to agree with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who likens Bush to Churchill, to see that the president has taken one of the British statesman's maxims to heart. "In wartime," Sir Winston confided, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." What is dawning on many people now is that in making the case for war, the administration and its allies did not make a fetish of strict honesty and candor. Why? Because if the American people had gotten the truth and nothing but the truth, they might not have been willing to go along with the whole enterprise. But the strategy worked so beautifully that it's being used for the postwar occupation as well. We were given no idea of what would happen once victory was achieved, and we have been given no idea what lies ahead. The danger for Bush is that one of these days, the public may be hit in the face with a cold dash of reality. The chief rationale for the invasion was that we had to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his vast arsenal of unconventional weapons. Unfortunately, those munitions have yet to be found, and Rumsfeld now admits that they may never be, because the Iraqis may have destroyed them. Why a thug regime that defied the United Nations for years would be so fastidious about eliminating all evidence of guilt at its hour of doom is a deep mystery. But the administration would rather live with this puzzle than admit that maybe Saddam Hussein didn't have the arsenal that Bush told us about. The U.S. government is not the only one capable of embellishing reality. Bush's ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who may prove to be a distant relative of Jayson Blair, put out a report saying that Iraq could use its weapons on 45 minutes' notice. But an anonymous British intelligence official told the BBC that claim was added at the insistence of the prime minister and "wasn't reliable." The administration also did its best to connect Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 atrocities. By endlessly relating the war on Iraq to the war on terrorism, the president managed to create some useful confusion. By the time the war began, 51 percent of Americans were operating on the assumption that Hussein was "personally responsible" for the terrorist attacks--which is about as plausible as blaming them on Lee Harvey Oswald. These deceptions are not exactly without precedent. If there is one constant in American history, it's that presidents of both parties tell lies to justify wars. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both made a habit of it in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan intervened in Lebanon insisting it was a vital U.S. interest, which his own national security adviser later admitted it was not. Bill Clinton sent troops to Bosnia in 1995 with a promise that they'd be home within 12 months. They're still there. So it should not be a surprise that the current president was willing to mislead us to build support for his invasion. Nor has the quality of information available to the public improved since the war. When it comes to the aftermath, the question is not whether Americans were misinformed: The picture painted by hawks was that the Iraqi people and their liberators would all live happily ever after, and that has turned out to be a fairy tale. No one in the White House predicted widespread looting, the collapse of order, anti-American protests, continuing attacks on U.S. troops, or the rise of fundamentalist Shiite groups. The only issue is whether the administration failed to tell us out of ignorance or out of deceit--whether the president and his aides were deliberately fooling us, or inadvertently fooling themselves. In any case, President Bush now has the problem of maintaining public support for a mission that promises to be expensive, open-ended, messy and thankless. But he has given the American people only the vaguest idea what they can expect. At a recent hearing, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) asked, "When is the president going to tell the American people that we're likely to be in the country of Iraq for three, four, five, six, eight, 10 years, with thousands of forces and spending billions of dollars?" Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, complained that "the administration has not sufficiently involved Congress and the American people in its plans regarding the costs, methods and goals of reconstructing Iraq." No, it hasn't, and it isn't about to. ---------- E-mail: schapman@tribune.com

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (19976)	6/4/2003 3:41:09 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

The Administration had a number of reasons for invading Iraq. Failure to verify the absence of WMDs was one, the connection to terrorism another, the flouting of UNSCR's ending the Gulf War was another..... Iraq never did provide verification that all the thousands of liters of WMD which the UN verified existed before they were expelled in 98 were in fact destroyed. We don't know that for sure until this day. This does not consider the possesion of the Al-Samouds, a prohibited delivery system for WMDs which the Iraqis denied they had. And, given the patience of various pinheads like yourself who were willing to extend the deadline interminably to provide that verification...it seems more than a bit hypocritical to have decided there are no such WMD at this point....we recently saw the discovery of the bioeapons labs just as Powell had described them. The link to the world terror apparatus is amply demostrated by the documentary evidence and the existence of Salman Pak, the discovery of bomb belts and Saddams payments to the families of homicide bombers, the arrest of Abu Abbaas, etc.... The foregoing does not include consideraiton of the shocking poverty Saddma imposed on most Iraqis, the cruelty and butchery which has been discovered, children imprisoned, etc.... Only a Bush hating moron could arrive at the conclusions you have reached.....you simply are not capable of dealing with the facts.....