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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (108604)	7/28/2003 10:39:54 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Can't People See the Emperor's Pants on Fire? ________________________________________ by Sheryl McCarthy Published on Monday, July 28, 2003 by the Long Island (NY) Newsday ________________________________________ George W. Bush is a big fat liar. There, someone had to say it. In the midst of the controversy over how a dubious claim about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium got into the president's State of the Union speech, why hasn't the president been called on the carpet? Let's see. Here are some of the top Bush people who'd been told that the uranium story was being challenged by intelligence experts: CIA chief George Tenet; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice; her deputy Stephen Hadley, who was charged with vetting the president's speech for accuracy; the president's chief speech writer Michael Gerson. Surely between all those trips he made to the CIA during the last year, Vice President Dick Cheney learned that the uranium story had a certain smell to it. Are we to believe that no one told the president? What should be clear by now is that the Bush administration used its intelligence on Iraq selectively, promoted only the bits and pieces that fit its argument, and ignored the rest. According to a New York Times article that appeared last week, this intelligence consisted of no more than scraps and fragments, some of them dating as far back as the first Gulf War, which were then patched together with assumptions that were made after the Sept. 11 attacks. Now that this smoke-and-mirrors scenario has been revealed, we're still tiptoeing around the obvious. We ask polite questions like whether we were "misled"; if the intelligence data were "hyped"; were the government's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons "exaggerated"; and did they put a little extra "spin" on what they knew. We avoid the "L" word altogether. The holes in the administration's intelligence on Iraq grow bigger every day. The claim that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase aluminum tubes to help build a nuclear bomb, one of the most damning charges Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the United Nations, is looking shaky, too. The International Atomic Energy Agency says the tubes were probably used to make ordinary rockets. Where's the outrage over the deception? Public opinion polls in the weeks since the president's State of the Union speech was called into question show no dip in his approval ratings over the claims. Americans find it hard to accept that their leaders can't be trusted about something as serious as war. Forget the many presidential lies of the past: Harry Truman about the necessity to bomb Hiroshima; John F. Kennedy about the missile gap with the Russians; Lyndon Johnson on the Gulf of Tonkin; Ronald Reagan about the reasons for invading Grenada. Patriotism and the need to feel united in wartime cause us to give presidents a wide berth, even when later revelations show they deceived us. It turned out all right in the end, we rationalize, and the world is surely better off without Saddam Hussein. As for Bush, Americans appear to have accepted a whole new lack of responsibility in their president, acknowledging that he's not a deep thinker and that he depends heavily on his advisers. Apart from being a cheerleader for the war, it's as if he's disconnected from it. We assume that the hard questions, the attention to detail, the grilling of the experts on the facts, the demands for proof, even the final decisions about strategy, were done by others. Bush was just the front man, so if mistakes were made, others must be to blame. The current haggling over what the president knew and when he knew it concerns only a tiny bit of his pro-war argument. Frankly, it's a distraction from the biggest chunk of non-evidence that's come to light: that so far not a trace of the weapons of mass destruction Hussein was supposed to have has turned up. We should be angry about the weapons scam, but it seems only the Washington press corps and a few presidential contenders are making a fuss. No one is saying the obvious: that when you take the country to war based on sparse and unreliable evidence that's disputed by your own experts, a war in which thousands of people died and more are being killed daily in its aftermath, that's the moral equivalent of lying. Say you heard it here. Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. commondreams.org