July 17, 2003
`Worse than a crime, it was a blunder,' was how the cynical Talleyrand famously described Napoleon's murder of the Duke d'Enghien.
The same may be said of President George Bush's attempts to murder the leader of a sovereign nation, Saddam Hussein, and his foolhardy eagerness to invade Iraq.
Thanks to Bush's blundering, nearly 50% of US Army combat units are now stuck in a spreading guerilla war in Iraq , costing US$4 billion monthly, that is becoming the biggest, most expensive, and bloodiest foreign mess since Vietnam. This when the US is threatening military action against North Korea.
As the furor in Washington grows over Bush's admission of false claims about Iraqi uranium imports from Niger in his keynote state of the union address, administration officials are viciously blaming one another.
George Tenet, CIA's overly meek director, became the fall-guy for the uranium fiasco, though he repeatedly warned the White House its claims were unsubstantiated. Blame rightly belongs to Bush himself, and to his woefully inadequate national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice.
Either Bush and Ms Rice knew the uranium story was a lie, or they were unfit for high office. Uranium ore is no more threatening than cake mix. To weaponize it, ore must be laboriously transformed into uranium hexafluoride gas, then separated and enriched in huge, highly visible plants, equipped with `cascades' of thousands of high-speed centrifuges. The US knew conclusively there were no such nuclear plants in Iraq. French intelligence warned the Niger story was bogus.
Nor had Iraq any means of delivering nuclear or biowarfare weapons. In short, zero offensive capability, and zero threat. At the time, Bush critics, including this column, dismissed as hogwash his claims Iraq was an `imminent threat' to the US. We were denounced as `un-patriotic' and `friends of Saddam' in the pro-war press. Former UN inspector Scott Ritter, who challenged White House lies, was vilified and smeared with loathsome personal attacks by the neo-con media.
The fake Niger uranium story apparently came from VP Dick Cheney's hawkish chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz, and was approved by Rice. Three days before the US invasion of Iraq, Cheney actually claimed Iraq ` has reconstituted nuclear weapons.'
As the Niger uranium scandal grows, it is increasingly clear the White House's campaign to drive Americans into an unjustified, unnecessary war had nothing to do with Iraq's alleged weapons nor its internal repression,.
Bush's crusade against Iraq was designed to assuage American's fury and fear over 9/11 by making Saddam Hussein a whipping boy for the attack in which he had no part. The jolly little wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were also designed to make Americans forget the Bush White House had been caught with its pants down by 9/11, and was deeply involved with the Enron financial disaster.
Who now remembers that witch-hunting Attorney General John Ashcroft actually cut spending on ant-terrorism before 9/11, or that Washington was giving millions to Taliban until four months before 9/11?
How better to get Americans to support a war than by insinuating, as did Bush, that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and claiming Iraq was about to attack the USA with weapons of mass destruction. A pre-emptive attack on Iraq was urgent to save America, insisted Bush.
A weak-kneed Congress and credulous public went along with White House warmongering, while the spineless UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and arms inspector, Hans Blix, wriggled like jellyfish. Most Democrats, including current presidential candidates, joined Bush's lynch mob.
It was not just the Niger canard. A torrent of lies that would have made Dr Goebbels envious poured from the administration, all aimed at justifying a war of aggression, thwarting the UN Security Council, ending UN inspections in Iraq, crushing a foe of Israel, and grabbing Iraq's oil riches.
Virtually all Administration claims about Iraq's weapons had been disproved by UN inspectors before Bush went to war.
Exposed as fakery: the drones of death; aluminum tubes for centrifuges; chemical munitions bunkers; mobile germ labs; hidden Scuds; links to al-Qaida and `poison camps;' Saddam's smallpox; Saddam's secret nuclear program.
And the biggest lie of all, Bush's absurd claims there was `no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,' and that it `threatened all mankind.'
Thanks to the shameful complicity of the US media, which amplified White House propaganda, 75% of Americans were led to believe Iraq attacked the US on 9/11, and was in league with al-Qaida. Bush's faux war on terrorism was re-directed, by clever White House spin, into a hugely popular campaign against Iraq. The failure to kill bin Laden was covered up by the rush to murder Saddam.
The litany of lies produced by the Bush White House and its neo-con allies would be farcical were it not for the deaths of so many Americans and Iraqis.
Of course, all politicians lie, but lying one's country into an unnecessary war is an outrage, and an impeachable offense. Playwright William Congreve might have been describing Bush when he wrote, three centuries ago, `Thou liar of the first magnitude.'
Foreign Correspondent
