Gordaen's Blog

Just as Cheney lied, Bush recently gave a less-than-honest answer to a question about two weeks ago. The question was what Iraq had to do with 9/11 and Bush replied: “Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack.” He went on to say: “Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.” I didn’t bother to blog about it because I knew he was playing with words to not flat-out lie, but then I saw a video today that changed my mind.

It was a YouTube video clip of The Daily Show from a while back. Toward the end, there was a short video of Bush saying, “The reason I keep insisting that, uh, there was a relationship between Iraq, Saddam, and al Qaeda is because there was a relationship…” Obviously, this wasn’t in direct conflict with what he said more recently, but I couldn’t remember it word for word. I went back and double-checked and saw that the two were parallel issues, but then I had a thought. The president has to justify an act of war, what were his reasons?

I looked at the whitehouse.gov site and saw this (his reasons for using military force against Iraq):

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Looking at the second section, you can see that again it is a matter of wording. Planned… authorized… committed… Those sound a lot like “ordered,” but aren’t entirely the same. Of course, then you look at the first section and see that he claimed Iraq was an actual threat against the United States. The claims were that Iraq had nuclear warheads, but even if that were true it would not constitute a threat against the United States. The distance from Baghdad to New York is about 6,000 miles. As far as I know, noone has ever claimed (with reasonable evidence) that Iraq has a missile with that range. In fact, I don’t think I have ever heard (reasonable) claims of them having a missile with a 1,000 mile range. They develop scud missiles, which are designed to hit neighboring countries, not travel across hemispheres.

Their greatest threat to us was inciting Bush’s desire for a pointless war, destroying the United States’ reputation around the world. Now the administration is claiming the goal is the freedom of the Iraqi people, or wait, they have that (more so than before anyway). The goal now is to prevent a potential civil war, because that’s definitely something we should be involved in… At what point will this administration realize that we need to ease ourselves out of their affairs and start working to rebuild a good reputation for the United States?

The next president is blessed and cursed. You certainly can’t do much worse than Bush, but it would definitely be unpleasant to take office when everything is worse than it was in 2000.