IraqWar – ILANA MERCER

No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes (Part 2)

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 04:51:41 +0000

“How does America change if our intelligence agencies were more accurate in their assessment of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs?”

The question was posed, just the other day, in “Make America Competent Again,” by David French, at the Dispatch, a neoconservative website. The tract is an agony aunt’s meander that calls on shoring-up competency in state and civil society.

But first: Dissecting, deconstructing and exposing the neoconservative mindset and machinations matters. The reason is this:

Thanks to President Trump, neoconservatives are not exactly having a moment—they’re down in the doldrums. But they’ll be back. For neoconservatives and liberal interventionists make up the Permanent State. The ideology the likes of David French, formerly of National Review, and his ilk promote—foreign-policy bellicosity, endless immigration, mindless consumerism, racial shaming, “canceling” of deviationists and conformity to an American identity that’s been melted away in vats of multiculturalism—is in our country’s bone marrow, by now.

Therefore, the fighting words in response to French’s framing of the invasion of Iraq as a mere glitch in intelligence are these:

Oh no you don’t, you so-and-so!!

No creedal neoconservative should be able to get away with the claim that a problem of criminality is really just a problem of competency.

You’d think that a military man like Mr. French would know that fixing problems rests on defining them with precision. Recasting state corruption and war crimes as incompetence cures neither state crimes nor incompetence.

America’s war on Iraq was a war crime, plain and simple. It was a reflexive collaboration between elements in a vast, by now familiar, intelligence bureaucracy, comprised of neoconservative and liberal interventionists, whose aim was to help The Powers that Be pulverize a country, Iraq, for the purpose of making it over in the image of America.

Contra Mr. French, the war on Iraq cannot be reduced to systemic incompetence. Anyone who doggedly tracked and documented the ramp up to war, as this column did, can attest that the United States bullied its way to war, monomaniacally.

Legions were the experts, credible ones, who categorically rejected the contention that there were WMD in Iraq. They were silenced; shut out by the malfunctioning American media, the politicians, their handlers and their followers—none of whom should be allowed to deflect from the intellectual and moral corruption it took to invade a Third World country, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the Gulf War, which had no navy or air force and was no threat to American national security.

Iraq had not attacked in 12 years and was not poised to attack the U.S. or its neighbors.

Whether one examines the casus belli from the perspective of Catholic “Just War Theory,” constitutional authority or natural law—the war on Iraq was a failure of morals, ethics and constitutional fidelity.

To attack Iraq was to launch a purely offensive, non-defensive war. This flouts the Christian duty to do no harm to one’s neighbors. It flouts the Jewish teachings, which instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice. It flouts “Just War Theory,” developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. It flouts the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors.

And it flouted what the Founding Fathers provided:

A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what the likes of Mr. French and the neoconservative power elite still advocate: a 21st-century Manifest Destiny. The fact that it does, can, and is still intent on spreading global (failing) democracy by death and destruction (Iran is next) indicates how limitless, unconstitutional, and dictatorial the American Permanent State truly is.

As is their wont, the nation’s pundits never stopped licking their chops for that war. And they’ll salivate just the same should the U.S. have its way with Iran.

So, what does it say about those who supported conquering and occupying a sovereign member of the international community?

Simply this: Whether it is committed by a group operating within or without the law—inside or outside the state—a crime is a crime. And turning Iraq from rogue state to failed state, and in the process killing and displacing multitudes: that was a war crime, executed with as much competency as criminals can muster.

Mr. French and his ideological compadres must not get away with dismissing George Bush’s bacchanalia of blood as a momentary lapse of competence.

**
See Part 1: “Incompetent, Imperial Neocons And The Permanent State”

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Trump Called Bush A Liar & He Won South Carolina (Nevada, Too)

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 27 Feb 2016 06:11:18 +0000

Donald Trump has buried George W. Bush, for good. Or so we hope.

This might not be “Morning in America,” but it is a moral victory for values in America. Somewhere in those Judeo-Christian values touted by “values voters” is an injunction against mass murder.

Before the February 20 South Carolina primary, it looked as though G. Bush might just make a comeback.

After the South Carolina primary, where Donald Trump won with 32.2 percent of the Republican vote, it seems certain that nothing will resuscitate the legacy of “one of the nation’s worst presidents.” Notwithstanding his war crimes and unprecedented intervention in the financial system and the private economy, “W” also happened to preside over the largest domestic spending since Lyndon Johnson. As chronicled in Ivan Eland’s “Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty,” “[Bush] advocated bad policies and demonstrated horrendous operational incompetence.”

The disastrous and expensive (in casualties and money) nation-building project in Iraq and Afghanistan were only exceeded in catastrophic results by Bush’s expansion of executive power and theft of the civil liberties that make the United States unique. Bush had almost no accomplishments to offset such foibles.

Trump addressed the war: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

The chattering class, Left and Right, was—still is—gobsmacked. A political Samson was bringing down the pillars of their world.

Desperate to restore equilibrium before the crucial SC vote was CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “You would not say again that George W. Bush lied?”

Trump obliged. He backpedaled before the primary, going with non-committal: “I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I mean, I’d have to look at documents.”

So America has some unfinished business. Because we do know. We can say for sure. And we have all the documents. George W. Bush lied America into war.

Bush began his ballyhooed presidency by lying during his campaign. He promised America a humble foreign policy, but came into office with the express purpose of using his plenary powers to unseat Saddam Hussein. Reliable sources—vaunted officials such as the former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism office, Vincent Cannistraro—attested that Bush started plotting to “settle” old scores with Saddam Hussein as soon as he got to the White House.

This was well after the International Atomic Energy Agency vouched Iraq had “dismantled its nuclear program.” To good effect, Bush and his bandits dusted off “decade old” IAEA reports and presented these as the casus belli for a new war. Yes, the Bush reports about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction were a “decade old”; out-of-date and inapplicable, when they were deployed to go to war, in 2003.

In 2004, U.S. weapons inspector David Kay was tasked with a post-invasion investigation as to why no WMD were found in Iraq. The evidence Kay marshaled was the same old evidence those of us who opposed the war cited back in the dying days of 2002. Having publicly fumed about the impotence of the IAEA’s much-maligned inspection process, Kay found himself in the embarrassing position of vouching for IAEA effectiveness.

IAEA inspectors were, in fact, still crisscrossing Iraq when Bush invaded.

For his 2004 tome “Plan of Attack,” author Bob Woodward was given his usual unparalleled access. Woodward conducted 75-odd interviews with members of the Bush administration’s inner sanctums, Bush too. Woodward concluded, and was lauded by the proud culprits themselves: “Bush is in charge. Bush is all over [Iraq].”

“Just five days after September 11,” by Woodward’s telling, “the president indicated to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that he was determined to do something about Saddam Hussein.”

On November 21, 2001, the bombastic Bush who had characterized his war as “the story of the 21st Century,” demanded an invasion plan from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“Get on it,” Bush barked.

Gen. Tommy Franks was then given carte blancheto develop such a strategy, for which the president, unbeknownst to Congress, siphoned $700 million from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War.

On February 16, 2002, Bush signed a “Top Secret intelligence order” granting authority to the CIA and the military to commence covert operations in Iraq. December 21, 2002 saw CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin summoned to the Oval Office to screen a slideshow of Iraq’s alleged WMD. The president took the lead. He made it clear that Tenet had to deliver on his promise of an intelligence “slam dunk.” Alas, G. Bush was wholly unimpressed by the “rough cut”:

“Nice try, but that isn’t gonna sell Joe Public.”

“Richard Clark, the White House anti-terrorism coordinator, reported that on the day after 9/11, even after he protested that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, Bush personally insisted that he look for one.” Clark’s memo disavowing such a connection was returned by the “office of Bush’s National Security Adviser with the comment: Wrong answer. Do it again.”

Soon, Secretary of State Rice was filling her days with forecasts of a Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter. On September 8, 2002, this liar told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security was appalled. “That’s just a lie,” he reiterated to New Republic.

The “Lie Factory—the Office of Special Plans”—was a central edifice of the Bush administration. The OSP, reminisces Justin Raimondo in a retrospective about Bush’s lies, was “a parallel intelligence-gathering agency set up by the neoconservatives in the administration [to feed] Congress and the media ‘factoids’ which were later proved to be false.”

To make his sub-intelligent case for war, Bush mustered the fictitious uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never-ever materialized.

“Guilt is an intrinsic quality of actions,” wrote the 19th-century American philosopher of liberty, Lysander Spooner. Judging by the actions they commanded, former President George Bush “and his neoconservative Rasputins” were–are—as guilty as sin for the crime of Iraq.

Before his February 23 victory in the Nevada caucuses, fresh from the win in South Carolina, Trump returned to Fox News to dance on George Bush’s political grave.

Pompous Chris Wallace imagined he’d get the upper hand with Donald Trump, but ended up changing the subject … quickly.

“The pundits, including yourself,” blasted a triumphant Trump, “thought I made a mistake when I took on Bush on that issue. But when I took on Bush on that issue, I never felt it was a bad thing to do because people that are smart know that the war in Iraq was a disaster.”

No more “neoconservative Rasputins.” “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Or, in Bushspeak: “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me … You can’t get fooled again!”

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance & The Unz Review
February 26, 2016

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Iraq Liars And Deniers: We Knew Then What We Know Now

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 23 May 2015 04:57:09 +0000

“If we knew what we know today, we would not have gone into Iraq”: This is as good an apology Republicans vying for the highest office are willing to offer, 12 years after launching a war that was immoral and unjust from the inception—as some of us pointed out from the inception—cost trillions in treasure, tens of thousands of lives (American and Iraqi), and flouted America’s national interests.

The big reveal began with Jeb Bush, who told anchor Megyn Kelly that knowing what we know now about Iraq, he would absolutely still have invaded Iraq. Broadcaster Laura Ingraham was having none of it. With the benefit of hindsight, she had arrived at the belated conclusion that the invasion was wrong. Ingraham suggested that Bush III was insane for sticking to his guns about Iraq.

Next to disgrace was Sen. Marco Rubio, also in the running. Six weeks back, Rubio had been unrepentant about the catastrophic invasion. After The Shaming of Jeb, Rubio changed his tune.

The title of Judith Chalabi Miller’s “rehab book tour” is, “If we knew what we now know … .” Over the pages of the New York Times, Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter had shilled for the Iraq war like there was no tomorrow. In her reporting, she channeled Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi conman who fed the moronic Miller with misinformation and lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The other conman was Bush II, president at the time. His administration assisted Miller—a woman already prone to seeing faces in the clouds—to tune-out and become turned-on and hot for war (also the title of a January 2003, “Return To Reason” column). No tale was too tall for our Judith; no fabrication too fantastic.

Miller’s “mistakes,” and those of America’s news cartel, are no laughing matter. But it took a Comedy Central icon to deconstruct her national bid for redemption. The fact that others were on board, Republicans and Democrats, is not exculpatory. Idiocy is bipartisan. Not everybody got it wrong. Miller and her ilk chose not to consult those who got it right. Miller had company.

The Fox News war harpies were certainly a dream come true for many American men. Who cared about honest reporting or basic fact-checking when a heaving bosom is yelling from the screen, “Sock it to Saddam, Dubya!”?

In any event, the meme, “If we knew what we know now, we would not have gone to war in Iraq,” is false; a lie. We most certainly knew what we know now as far back as 2002, which was when this column wrote:

Iraq is a secular dictatorship profoundly at odds with Islamic fundamentalism. No less an authority than the former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism office, Vincent Cannistraro, stated categorically that there was no evidence of Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda. Even the putative Prague meeting between Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of Sept. 11, and Iraqi intelligence, turned out to be bogus. … Iraq has been 95-percent disarmed and has no weapons of mass destruction, an assessment backed by many experts in strategic studies.

The column excerpted was published on September 19, 2002, in Canada’s national newspaper. On that day, the flirty notes and the gracious dinner invitations from America’s leading neoconservatives ceased.

Indeed, there were many experts, credible ones, who categorically rejected the contention that there were WMD in Iraq. But they were silenced; shut out by the media—the Hannities, the Millers, the dissidents, their handlers and their followers—none of whom should be allowed to deflect from the intellectual and moral corruption it took to invade a Third World country whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the Gulf War, which had no navy or air force and was no threat to American national security.

Eleven years ago, “What WMD?”, courtesy of WND, documented the same old verities. No, not everyone was bullish about the Bush administration’s WMD balderdash. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council before the war: There were no nuclear-designated aluminum tubes in Iraq; no uranium was imported, and no nuclear programs were in existence. Between 1991 and 1998, the IAEA had managed to strip Iraq of its fuel-enriching facilities, tallying inventories to a T. In David Kay’s late-in-the-day assessment, “Iraq’s large-scale capability to produce and fill new chemical weapons (CW) munitions was reduced, if not entirely destroyed, during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Fox and 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections.” Kay was the former top U.S. weapons inspector who endeared himself to the media as an invasion enthusiast.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), Congress in 1999 was privy to intelligence reports which similarly attested to a lack of “any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox (1998) to reconstitute its WMD program.” Accounts of this nature had evidently been available to Congress for years. These reiterated, as one report from the Defense Intelligence Agency did, that, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998.”

“Kay’s news ought not to have been new to the blithering boobs in Congress,” I observed in 2004. The CEIP further bears out that in October of 2002, Congress was apprised of a National Intelligence Estimate, a declassified version of which was released only after the war. Apparently, entire intelligence agencies disputed key contentions that the administration—its experts, and its congressional and media backers—seized on and ran with.

While clearly pandering to policy makers, U.S. intelligence reports were still heavily qualified by conjectural expressions such as, “We believe Iraq could, might, possibly, and probably will.” The State Department and the White House, however, cultivated a custom of issuing Top Secret “fact” sheets with definitive statements from which all traces of uncertainty had been expunged.

Having categorically denied she possessed the analytical wherewithal to connect the dazzlingly close dots between terrorism and Arab men practicing their aeronautical take-off skills stateside—Condoleezza Rice was suddenly doing nothing but connecting disparate dots. She, Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush never stopped lying about a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, chemical and biological blights, Scuds and squadrons of unmanned aerial vehicles streaking U.S. skies, and traveling laboratories teeming with twisted scientists. The language they deployed ignored the deep dissent in the intelligence community.

All the above information addressing pre-war knowledge has been culled from WND’s early, Return to Reason columns.

In 2003, “Bush’s 16 Words Miss the Big Picture” beseeched our readers to “see Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was”:

The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework, it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes—it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, the column implored, “dissect and analyze what in September 2002 I called the lattice of lies leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible meetings with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.”

“But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you?”

“Rationalize With Lies,” moreover, dealt a blow to the creative post hoc arguments made to justify the unnecessary war the United States waged on a sovereign nation that had not attacked us, was no threat to us and was certainly no match for us. The argument:

“To say that Saddam may have had WMD is quite different from advocating war based on those assumptions. It’s one thing to assume in error; it’s quite another to launch a war in which tens of thousands would die based on mere assumptions, however widely shared. It was not the anti-war-on-Iraq camp that intended to launch a war based on the sketchy information it had. The crucial difference between the Bush camp and its opponents lies in the actions the former took.”

Second, it matters a great deal when during the last decade someone said Saddam was in possession of impermissible weapons. To have said so in 1991 is not the same as saying so in 2003, by which time Iraq had so obviously been cowed into compliance and was crawling with inspectors.

Naturally, at certain times during Iraq’s belligerent history, opponents of this war would have agreed Hussein had a weapons program. But by 1998, sensible people realized that Operation Desert Storm, followed by seven years of inspections, made the possibility of reconstituting such a program remote. President Jacques Chirac said as much to both Bush and Blair, who pretended not to hear.

To arrive at the correct conclusions about Bush’s undeniable delirium for war, it was necessary to employ facts and reality, Just War Theory developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors, the natural law and what the Founding Fathers provided:

“A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition, doesn’t, cannot and must never pursue what Bush and his neoconservatives were after: a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”

Republicans are still fond of presenting their opponents with the following false choice: “But what would you have done about Iraq?” they are in the habit of asking me. The assertion is intended to make you assume incorrectly that something had to be done about Iraq. However, “The burden of proof is on he who proposes the existence of something like WND, not on he who claims that it does not exist.” That line was penned 12 years ago.

In the early days, Iraq had provided “documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD.” I recall the derision and mockery with which the Bush administration and its hangers-on greeted what turned out to be the only truthful document in the sad saga of Iraq.

©ILANA Mercer
WND, Junge Freiheit, Quarterly Review, Praag.org,
The Libertarian Alliance & Target Liberty
May 22, 2015

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GOP Should Grow A Brain, Join The Peace Train

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:02:25 +0000

“If you ever hear of a group forming up to stop X, put your money on X,” said Richard Nixon to Pat Buchanan, in 1968—repeated approvingly, in 2014, by MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews. The X on whom Matthews, a Democrat in bone and blood, was putting his money is Rand Paul, the senator from Kentucky, whom Matthews has praised for prosecuting a “fratricidal war” within the Republican Party, over foreign policy, in general, and the war on Iraq, in particular.

Matthews was genuinely taken with the philippic Rand delivered against his Republican detractors. “Today it’s another Texas hawk defending himself against Rand Paul,” he exclaimed. “Can Gov. Rick Perry stop Rand Paul? Can he lead a Stop Paul movement …? I say this because, whether you like his libertarian philosophy [or not], Rand Paul has street smarts. He doesn’t let Rick Perry get away with calling him an isolationist. He’s gone on offense and nailed Perry this morning for saying he wants to send U.S. troops back into Iraq. Well, let Perry carry that around on his back for a while. … Perry acts like it was such a great idea, attacking, invading and occupying Iraq, he wants us to do it again.”

Perry was not the only Republican warbot to pile on Sen. Paul. “In the past three days alone, recapitulated Politico, Texas Gov. Rick Perry used a Washington Post op-ed to warn about the dangers of ‘isolationism’ and describe Paul as ‘curiously blind’ to growing threats in Iraq. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused the Kentucky senator on CNN of wanting a ‘withdrawal to fortress America.’ And former Vice President Dick Cheney declared … that ‘isolationism is crazy,’ while his daughter, Liz Cheney, said Paul ‘leaves something to be desired, in terms of national security policy.'”

Like McMussolini, the vampiric father and daughter duo are a spent force, easily dismissed by a young turk. But can Rand stand up to the Joint Chiefs? Military movers and shakers are heavily vested in the sunk-cost fallacy—the irrational notion that more resources must be committed forthwith in Iraq (and elsewhere), so as to “redeem” the original misguided commitment of men, money and materiel to the mission. To that end, repeated ad nauseam is the refrain about our “brave men and women of the military,” whose sacrifice for Iraqi “freedoms” will be squandered unless more such sacrifices are made. The Skeptic’s Dictionary dispels this illogic: “To continue to invest in a hopeless project is irrational. Such behavior may be a pathetic attempt to delay having to face the consequences of one’s poor judgment. The irrationality is a way to save face, to appear to be knowledgeable, when in fact one is acting like an idiot.” Besides, it’s time the military heed its paymasters, The American People, a majority of whom “don’t want to send U.S. soldiers back into Iraq.”

No small part of Paul’s mission is to break the curse of Chucky Krauthammer and Co. The very identity of the punditocracy is derived from its position within “the nimbus of great power.” Hawks like him reap “the benefits of being at the center of the Imperium.” The eclipse of American power threatens Krauthammer and his ilk. For how else will the Washington-New York set retain its top-dog status? Like most neocon artists—who were once radical leftists and are still hardcore Jacobins—on the invasion of Iraq, Krauthammer dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive and reckless verbiage.

The neoconservatives had dismissed and maligned the libertarian Old Right and rubbished generals and government officials who warned against that war: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Secretary of the Army Thomas White, former general and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft; former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf; former NATO Commander Wesley Clark; former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, and Marine Corps Commandant James Jones: all were cool to W’s war. Retired General Anthony Zinni, distinguished warrior, diplomat and card-carrying Republican, cautioned Congress against the “wrong war at the wrong time.” At the time, the neocons dismissed them all as “yesterday’s men.”

Still, the tide is turning, albeit slowly. A passionate populist, influential broadcaster Laura Ingraham has dropped hints about being prepared to reject the War Party’s scorch-and-burn tactics. “Congressman Gutierrez,” Ingraham said on ABC’s “This Week,” “is closer to the Republican grassroots on the issue of Iraq, than the Republican leaders are. He’s on to something.” What did Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez say? “We shouldn’t have been in Iraq in the first place.”

Soon, the only holdout will be Mark Levin. The brainy broadcaster galvanized his rhetorical firepower to defend Dick Cheney from Bill Clinton’s coruscating attack. “Meet the Press’s” David Gregory had asked “Bill Clinton about the current crisis in Iraq and whether Dick Cheney is a ‘credible critic’ in going after the Obama administration for ISIS taking over major cities there. Clinton chuckled and said, ‘I believe if they hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, none of this would be happening.'” A no-brainer.

Rand Paul is no Ron Paul, who is sui generis. The son has been a disappointment to those of us who take the libertarian injunction against the initiation of aggression very seriously. Rand’s support for renewed airstrikes against Iraq and his advocacy of ongoing American “assistance to the government of Iraq, by way of “armaments and intelligence”—these are unfortunate and unsupportable.

However, Rand Paul is to be commended for creating political oscillation where none existed, and reminding those who insist on “repeating the history, the rhetoric and presumably, the mistakes” of Iraq of their folly. More materially: For once, this deeply divided territory—for the U.S. is no longer a nation—is united in its aversion to the political elite’s adventures abroad. Witness the avowed lefty Chris Matthews praising Paul’s perspective and panache.

The GOP should grow a brain and hop on the peace train.

*Image courtesy The Street

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BUSH HIGH CRIMES VS. HILLARY & HER HUSBAND

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 11 Jun 2003 00:00:00 +0000

At issue here are Bush’s high crimes—not misdemeanors—that make Watergate and the Iran Contra, much less Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes, pale in comparison ~ilana

Here’s the nub and the rub: Smart people know that truth is immutable and objectively ascertainable. They know that, while a lie is a lie, some lies are face-saving understandable fibs, while others are deadly and dreadful breaches and infractions. Bush’s lies about the war on Iraq were the latter ~ilana

I don’t give a tinker’s toss what’s in Hillary’s book. For this column, I haven’t even googled the title of the tome that is the talk of the town. One of the reasons for my apathy is that Hillary is intellectually uninteresting. This solemn commissar’s most “interesting” idea has been to recommend that we look to North Korea and Cuba for hints on health-care reform! The senator’s other contribution to undermining individual rights and responsibilities is the clannish and communistic, “It Takes a Village.”

Today’s leading contender for contempt, however, is not Hillary, but President Bush and his deceiving administration.

At issue here are high crimes—not misdemeanors—that make Watergate and the Iran Contra, much less Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes, pale in comparison. But to watch the debate, elevated to operatic levels by neoconservative opinion and policy makers, one gets the impression that whether Hillary really loves Bill or whether he caught her off guard are the defining moral questions of the day.

Here’s the nub and the rub: Smart people know that truth is immutable and objectively ascertainable. They know that, while a lie is a lie, some lies are face-saving understandable fibs, while others are deadly and dreadful breaches and infractions.

Bush’s lies about the war on Iraq were the latter.

Bush acted solo to obstruct the very checks and balances put in place to ensure that a measure of parliamentary representation, for what it’s worth, ensued. Yet he continues to equate his will to war with the will of the bamboozled American people.

The few remaining honest experts awoke recently to the fact that the two burned-out trucks were not where the Iraqi Einsatzgrüppen (mobile, murdering Nazi units) plotted mayhem. But Bush didn’t care. At the very same time, he was telling the troops that these trucks were without a doubt “mobile biological weapons facilities,” a lie he repeated to Vladimir Putin.

Having gotten away with so many lies, Bush now lies recklessly.

Its own experts told the administration that those “aluminum tubes” Iraq imported had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Yet Pinocchio Powell, his president, and the vice president continued to spread the canard well after the lies were exposed, even repeating of late the fraudulent allegation that Iraq transacted with Niger to procure uranium.

I had read through the Blix and ElBaradei weapons-inspection reports. Unlike most conservatives, I was able to discern this was not the time for a red-herring debate about the U.N.’s undisputed illegitimacy. Required here was a rational assessment as to whether two stodgy career bureaucrats, accompanied by many scientists, were doing their routine jobs.

Their information agreed with the information of other veteran weapons inspectors, with independent international experts, with the important (“old”) European nations, and with the general thrust of our own intelligence community. To the sober mind, the Blix-ElBaradei reports were as bland as they were balanced. Having scoured thousands of kilometers in only three months, the men had found no evidence in Iraq of renewed attempts to produce Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Our military’s findings, to date, concur.

Contrast the many diverse voices, working to resolve the matter peacefully, with an administration that wanted nothing other than to go to war. Still less convincing were the flaccid, foolish and buffoon-like media, standing firm behind the administration. Their reports on WMD were almost always backed by “unnamed sources close to the administration” (read: high-stake Iraqi defectors and exiles), a journalistic no-no. Their uncritical, shoddy, embed evidence consisted of unverified accounts of overactive Geiger counters, and nondescript footage of rusty vats. No weaponized chemicals and no dispersing systems were found.

I saw no evidence, moreover, that the intelligence community truly backed Mr. Bush’s wild claims. On the contrary, no sooner did the CIA’s chief George Tenet refute the Iraq/al-Qaida link than the Bush war momentum veered sharply in the WMD direction. The intelligence documents available at the time on government websites echoed the now hotly debated Defense Intelligence Agency’s report issued in September 2002. Peppered with conjecture like “Iraq probably” and “could foreseeable,” they entailed no hard evidence of WMD.

The relentless and erratic nature of Bush’s war impetus was suspicious in itself. From the moment he decided to go to war, it was obvious to the keen observer that he was unstoppable. The information he cited to justify the madness was never phrased in a tentative way, as any amount of sane, truth-seeking caution would have required. It was always referred to as irrefutable. Again, this suggested the working of an unreasonable mind.

The president never wavered. However, confronted at last with controversy, he has now, for the first time, lowered his tone to claim there was only “a program of WMD.” Does he mean there might not have been actual WMD, but just a plan on paper?

The justification of last resort now animating the nation, thanks to the propagandists, is addressed by the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Sheldon Richman: “There is no warrant in the U.S. Constitution for the president of the United States to launch a war in order to liberate people from a brutal government.” Unless, of course, you join liberals in adopting the odious doctrine of a “living Constitution,” as the conservatives have clearly done.

*Credit as screen pic

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