There is no longer any real question about whether
Bush lied to Congress and the
American people about Iraq. He did.
The aluminum tubes, the uranium from Niger,
the unmanned drones rigged to spew clouds of
bio-toxins over New York City at any
second? All lies. The
Bush administration's public statements themselves demonstrate
these were lies, and no further Congressional
inquiry is necessary to prove it.
But if the lies were bad, the innuendos were
worse. Brazenly exploiting the tragedy,
the administration intentionally (and successfully)
created a connection between Iraq
and September 11th in the mind of the public
that simply did not exist. Bush sold the
attack using the same smoke and mirrors Enron
used to earn "profits." Again,
Congress need not hold hearings to establish
this fact. The Bush administration's
public statements already on record are all that
is needed.
Thus it really doesn't matter if they ever find
weapons of mass destruction. The Bush
administration isn't going to find Nigerian uranium
or drones capable of attacking the
United States no matter how hard they look.
Even if they do find something else,
Bush still lied.
While congressional hearings might provide some
nice political theater (and have
therefore been blocked by the Republicans), they
are not really necessary. The
fundamental question created by the war on Iraq
has been answered. The Bush
administration deliberately deceived the American
public. To what degree matters
not. They did so to drag the Nation into
a war. They did so at least partially, if not
principally, to influence the 2002 Congressional
elections, and solidify their hold
on domestic political power.
That ought to be enough. That their war
has now become a guerrilla campaign, with no
end in sight to the loss of American blood and
treasure, ought to be entirely too much.
But for the supplicant US corporate press, somehow
the lives of US servicemen sacrificed
on the alter of Rovian political calculations
is not a cause for concern.
To everyone but the press, Bush's defense against
the charge that he lied is so completely
inept as to be laughable. The cover-up looks
exactly like the work of an administration that
can't eat a pretzel and ride a Segway at the
same time.
First out of the chute was the theory that the
weapons were squirreled out of the country
by terrorists. They dropped this line when
they belatedly realized that the whole purpose
of the war was to prevent that from happening.
The more recent justification is that Saddam
had these weapons in the past, and that everyone
from Bill Clinton to the United Nations
thought he still had them. You know they
are desperate when they start invoking the UN
and Bill Clinton to support their cause.
But the issue isn't whether others believed Saddam
was a danger; plainly they did. The issue
is whether the Bush administration lied to portray
him as a bigger menace than he was. And
clearly they did exactly that. So they are left
with the same song and dance they started with;
they will find the WMDs, and Saddam
was a really bad guy who killed his own people.
That Saddam is evil was never in dispute.
No one has forgotten that when Bush's father
inspired and then abandoned an Iraqi revolution,
and Saddam quickly killed everyone in
Iraq stupid enough to read Bush's lips.
The pictures of dead Kurdish children published
in Newsweek were hard to forget. So is
the reality that these crimes were insufficient to
mobilize US public opinion to support a war.
Ergo, the administration invented its tales
of weapons of mass destruction.
Just as with the cover up, the hunt for the WMDs
has now become a joke unto itself.
The search first turned surreal when Bush was
confronted with a question as to their
whereabouts while in Poland. Reflexively
lying again, Bush claimed we had found them!
Since we hadn't, the American press was ordered
not to dwell on the President's words,
and administration officials hastily explained
that President did not mean what he said,
and to pay no attention to the man behind the
curtain. The desired effect was nevertheless
created as the number of mouth breathing Bush
voters who believed United States had
found WMDs went over 40%.
Back in the real world, the search for WMDs essentially
ended last week when the military
announced it had more or less run out of places
to search, and would basically stop looking.
Perhaps the US soldiers in Iraq thought the rocket
propelled grenades getting shot at them
were a more pressing issue than looking for Republican
campaign props. Whatever the reason,
the fact that the search had ended, of course,
did not prevent the Bush folks back in Washington
from continuing to insist they would eventually
be found. It just gave it an "OJ Simpson on the
golf course" kind of feel when they said it.
No one in the national media thought to ask them
how they intended to find weapons that might
not even exist now that they were no longer even looking.
As attacks in Iraq linger on, and casualties
continue to mount, Bush's "Mission Accomplished"
stunt off the San Diego coastline is looking
more and more premature on all counts. Perhaps
the banner should have read "Photo-Op Accomplished"
or "Mid-term Election Diversion
Accomplished" because if anything is clear in
Iraq, it is that the United States has a long way
to go before it is done cleaning up after the
administration's lies. Yet the media has replaced
its saturation coverage of the war in Iraq with
saturation coverage of the Lacy Peterson trial,
so the Bush administration won't have to pay
a price for any of this.
This is, in some sick way, appropriate.
The media's relationship to the Bush administration
has become analogous to that of a beaten wife.
They live in such fear of the administration
they can no longer sort out reality when the
administration speaks. Just one example; when
discussing the not-quite-accomplished mission,
the patriotically correct media has now adopted
the military's convention of referring to Iraqis
who attack a foreign army occupying their
country as "terrorists."
Yet the media blame themselves for the abuse
they suffer. So they dutifully write down the
administration's immoral and implausible narrative
that the reasons for the war on Iraq don't
matter, and echo Republican claims that anyone
who questions the administration's
laughable stories about the war is politically
motivated.
One can only hope that despite the battered press
corps, people will come to understand
that the war was marketed to the American public
like a used car, except more dishonestly.
Hopefully, the public will remember the sales
job came on the eve of the mid-term elections,
and they will connect the dots and realize that
the lead up to the war was intended to distract
the public from the story that Bush's biggest
financial backers were crooks who bankrupted
thousands of their own employees while becoming
fabulously wealthy in the process. Hopefully,
they realize that although Saddam was a nasty
piece of work, the American public was never
going to go to war on the real facts, so lies
were told by Bush to sway public opinion in favor
of the war. Finally, one can only hope
that the enormity of this deception will matter.
Because if it doesn't, nothing will.