DSM - Keep Your Eye On The Ball

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Downing Street Memo – Keep Your Eye On The Ball

On Oct 9, 2002, Senator Joe Biden gave a floor speech preceding the IWR vote and reflected on the words of an old law professor who admonished his juries to avoid sensationalist characterizations and “keep your eye on the ball”. All these days later, those words were never more important than they are in dealing with the Downing Street Memo.

From Senator Biden’s Remarks:

“The President said he has not decided whether or not we are going to go to war. He said it is his hope that we not go to war. It is his hope it can be avoided. Yet, for the first time in the history of the United States of America, in my judgment, the President of the United States is asking for the Congress to give him the equivalent of a declaration of war--to go to war--before the President has made up his mind. He has not made up his mind.

Keep your eye on the ball. Follow the bouncing ball like in the old Lawrence Welk days. A, the President has not decided whether or not to go to war; B, the President says give me the authority to go to war; C, we say on what basis do you want to go to war, Mr. President?

The details matter. If, for example, we leave here, setting a precedent, suggesting the reason we might go to war is because of this new doctrine of preemption, which no one has explained--no one has explained it.”

That is the question the Downing Street Memo answers. When George Bush was telling Congress he had not made a decision to go to war, that he hoped to avoid it, that he only sought to disarm Saddam Hussein, he was not telling the truth. Rather, he was implementing the Bush Doctrine, the first step being a Preemptive War intended to so intimidate the world with our military might that all nations would succumb. Shock and Awe was not aimed at Saddam or the Iraqi National Guard, the “psychological destruction of the enemy’s will to fight” was aimed at the entire world.

As Senator Biden also said that day “So, for Lord's sake, anybody who decides to vote for this resolution, please do not rest it on this cockamamie notion of preemption. You will rue the day. If that is the precedent we establish for our own safety's sake, you will rue the day.”

It is this doctrine of preemption that is the question. As I laid out in “Iraq Road to Hell”, the Bush Administration will continue to roll out their charade of excuses and covers. They have done it again in claiming HR 4655 gave the President authority to launch a war. It did nothing of the sort, as Right LEFT Story clearly lays out. Nowhere in HR 4655 is war authorized.

Congress, in 2002, did not authorize war to implement the Bush Doctrine of Preemption either. Bush was required to declare all peaceful and diplomatic means had been exhausted, and that Iraq posed a grave threat to the US. He made that declaration 2 days after he deployed troops, in March 2003. He knew it wasn’t true because he planned to “fix the intelligence to the policy” all along. As John Bonifaz wrote when requesting a Resolution of Inquiry, this declaration to Congress is in violation of the “False Statements Accountability Act of 1996”.

The Downing Street Memo is simple. It validates the words of numerous officials, analysts, aides, and more. George Bush intended to launch a war on Iraq since the first days of his Presidency. We have unwittingly implemented the Bush Doctrine’s “cockamamie notion of preemption” and American supremacy. That is not what Congress or the American people supported.

Keep Your Eye On The Ball

LINKS:
http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/?view=plink&id=1047