The truths about Iraq that Bush isn't telling

[Barrett808]

The truths about Iraq that Bush isn't telling
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By Steve Chapman
Originally published September 23, 2003

CHICAGO - After eight years of Bill Clinton and 32 months of George W. Bush, it isn't news when a president dissembles, misleads, deceives, conceals, fudges or lies. News is something out of the ordinary, such as a president telling the truth.

That's why President Bush made headlines last week when he said something that was known to everyone - well, everyone except 69 percent of the American people. "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11," he informed reporters.

As revelations go, this one was about as surprising as learning that Mike Tyson is not the Dalai Lama. But Mr. Bush's admission contradicted his own vice president - who earlier in the week had resurrected the tale that one of the hijackers had met with an Iraqi intelligence operative. For some truly inexplicable reason, the administration suddenly developed a fetish about accuracy, and one official after another trooped forward to disown Mr. Cheney's claim.

Apparently the vice president violated Mr. Bush's strict policy, which is never to say anything bogus outright when you can effectively communicate it through innuendo, implication and the careful sowing of confusion.

At a news conference shortly before the campaign in Iraq began, Mr. Bush invoked the memory of Sept. 11 no fewer than eight times. That was enough to foster the widespread impression that we were launching a retaliatory attack, not a pre-emptive one.

But the real scandal is not that the president contrived to frame a poor, innocent dictator. It's that he depicted the invasion as a vital part of the war on terror, and continues to do so - even as the evidence accumulates that, from the standpoint of the war on terror, it was about the worst thing we could have done.

Why? Three reasons.

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