Did Bush Deceive Us in His Rush to War?
Now that the war has been won, is it permissible to suggest that our emperor has no clothes? I'm not referring to his abysmal stewardship of the economy but rather the fig-leaf war he donned to cover up his glaring domestic failures.
President Bush went to war with Hitler's Germany and found another Afghanistan instead. After comparing the threat of Hussein to that of the Fuhrer, it was odd to find upon our arrival a tottering regime squatting on a demoralized Third World populace.
Now the pressure is on for Bush to find or plant those alleged weapons of mass destruction fast or stand exposed as a bullying fraud.
Of course, our vaunted intelligence forces knew well from our overhead flights and the reports of U.N. inspectors freely surveying the country that Iraq had been reduced by two decades of wars, sanctions and arms inspections to a paper tiger, but that didn't keep the current administration from depicting Baghdad as a seat of evil so powerful it might soon block the very sun from shining.
And while Emperor Bush piled on the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, his bespectacled vizier for defense presented a mad-hatter laundry list of Iraq's alleged weapons collection, as long and specific as it was phony and circumstantial.
Secretary of State Colin Powell's now infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council employed "intelligence" cribbed from a graduate student's thesis, documents later acknowledged as fakes, and a defector's affirmation of the existence of chemical weapons while excluding his admission that they had subsequently been destroyed.
Having taken over the country, we now know with a great deal of certainty that if chemical or biological weapons were extant there, they were not deployed within the Iraqi military in a manner that threatened the U.S. or anyone else.
Likewise, Bush's fear-mongering about Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program has proven baseless. There was no reason to hurriedly yank the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq.
Even Bush's only real ally outside of Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is worried that the fearsome weapons will not turn up -- or that a skeptical world will believe they were planted as an afterthought. "Some sort of objective verification" of weapons finds would be a "good idea," he said last week.
