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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (247897)	7/1/2003 10:49:29 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Bush was just plain wrong on Iraq __________________________ BY ANDREW GREELEY* Columnist The Chicago Sun-Times June 27, 2003 suntimes.com Humans tend to see what they want to see. If facts seem to challenge our preconceptions, we reject them. Thus, practically everyone in Chicago believes Sammy Sosa's explanation of the corked bat. I personally think White Sox fans put the bat in the wrong place, where Sammy picked it up by mistake. Sox fans would do anything to ruin the Cubs' season and to divert attention from their own miserable showing. Right? Moreover, our attitude on the Martha Stewart case is shaped by our opinions about women who muscle their way to the top in the corporate world. My suspicions about her indictment are also based on the propensity of federal attorneys to promote their own careers by going after ''big fish'' with technical indictments. (Stewart ''obstructed justice'' by denying she had engaged in insider trading. Failure to confess guilt immediately is apparently a crime in itself.) Thus, I think it is unfair to say that the Bush administration deliberately deceived the American people about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The deception was not deliberate because the president, the vice president and the secretary of defense believed with their heart and soul that Saddam Hussein was a serious threat to the United States. Indeed, the ''intellectuals'' around Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated ''taking out'' Saddam even before the Supreme Court selected Bush to be president. The World Trade Center attack provided the rage among the American people to sell such an invasion. The intelligence reports, like all such reports, were uncertain, problematic, ambiguous. The hawks in the administration saw what they wanted to see and concluded that they were right: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which he was ready to use; he was cooperating with al-Qaida, he had or would soon have a nuclear bomb. The hawks knew all these things were true, and had known it for some time. There were plenty of hints in the intelligence data to support what they already knew. Remember me and the White Sox? Didn't they send a thug to torment Sammy at Camden Yards? So the hawks ignored the weakness of the data and argued that we had to get Saddam before he got us. Preemptive war was all right because Saddam was ready, willing and able to work mass destruction on the United States. Now that most of the intelligence that confirmed their faith seems questionable, they are unable to back down and say that maybe they were wrong. Similarly, they are unable for reasons of faith to admit that they were wrong about Iraqi reaction to our invasion. The Iraqis would dance in the streets and throw flowers at our tanks. Instead, they loot, they shoot at us, and they riot against us. The hawks can't admit that they were wrong on this subject, either. So I do not believe that the deception was deliberate. They did not intend to lie to the American people. Rather, they wanted to prove to the American people that they were right, with little respect for the poor quality of their data. The point is that, however sincere they were, they did deceive. They were just plain wrong. The president was just plain wrong. People who make such terrible mistakes should not be retained in office. In large corporations, officials who make similar errors in judgment are discarded (usually with a fat purse in their pocket). The whole chicken-hawk cabal should be swept out of office. In American politics, this is usually accomplished by congressional investigation. However, given the Bush administration's propensity to stonewall and cover up and the pro-administration bias of much of the media, full-scale investigation is unlikely. Despite token movements in that direction, the mantra ''national security'' will be invoked to prevent investigation. Just now the federal government can do almost anything it wants. It must be emphasized that while lies are immoral, bad judgment at the senior level of government--being so utterly wrong--is intolerable and dangerous in a nuclear world. ________________________________ *Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, author, and sociologist. He teaches at the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago.