President Bush lashed out today at critics of his Iraq policy, accusing them of trying to rewrite history about the decision to go to war and saying their criticism is undercutting American forces in battle.
"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said in a Veterans Day speech in Pennsylvania.
It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began? Excuse me? If I recall, the Bush White House was constantly rewriting the history regarding their reasons of why we had to go to war in Iraq. First, Iraq had WMDs--or was trying to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. The evidence for yellowcake purchases from Niger turned out to be forgeries. Then it was Iraq was a serious threat to the United States, with smoking guns turning into mushroom clouds. The U.N. inspectors never found any smoking guns. Then the reason was Iraq was a state-sponsor of terrorism, and Iraq was helping al Qaida. Well, no evidence surfaced regarding that connection. Then it was Saddam was an evil person--comparable to Adolph Hitler, and the U.S. was like the victorious allies--where Iraqi women and children would flow flowers down at the soldier's feet. Just about every reason that President Bush presented for the U.S. to invade Iraq has been debunked. And yet, the administration continues to present their own re-written version of history. Continuing on:
Today's remarks by the president, which painted his critics as hypocrites, drew quick and angry responses from Democrats, and quickly led to a back-and-forth with Republicans about who was exploiting Veterans Day by using it as a forum to voice their views on Iraq. The president's speech is part of a new strategy by the administration that will play out in the next few weeks in other presidential speeches and remarks by other leading Republicans, top senior administration officials said.
The president spoke at the Tobyhanna Army Depot near Wilkes-Barre. He talked not only about why Americans are at war - "the terrorists are as brutal an enemy as we've ever faced, unconstrained by any notion of our common humanity or by the rules of warfare" - something he has mentioned in almost every speech, but turned on his critics more directly than he usually does.
What is so funny is that President Bush's name-calling of the Democrats "hypocrites" is the only argument he has for defending this war. His credibility and trustworthiness has been shot, a top White House aid is on trial for lying, and serious allegations regarding Valerie Plame's outing still taint Vice President Cheney and ubber-strategist Karl Rove. Bush no longer has a reasonable argument left as to why we should be in Iraq. And if you can't use reason to win the debate, you end up reverting to name calling. But it gets better. Bush continues on, saying:
"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," he said. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."
That's the old, "You're either with us or against us. And if you're against us, then you're with the terrorists," attack. Of course, there's the added argument of, "If you're not supporting the war, then you're not supporting the troops." I don't know how many times I've heard these baseless points brought up again and again through the Republican Echo-Machine. And yet they still keep coming back to them. But the best is yet to come:
Before going to war, Mr. Bush said, Democrats and Republicans alike were privy to the same intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
"Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," he said. "These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."
A bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure. The simple reason they didn't find any evidence of political pressure was that Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan, drug his feet at initiating any investigation of intelligence connections with the White House. Roberts has been delaying that investigation--even though he has promised to look into the White House use of intelligence as a marketing plan for the war. It was Roberts' feet dragging and delaying tactics that caused Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to invoke Rule 21, and force a closed session debate in the Senate two weeks ago. Finally, while accurate intelligence assessments of Saddam's WMD program was certainly hard to come by for both the Bush and Clinton administrations, it was George Bush, and the neocon advisors who worshipped PNAC, that decided the U.S. should invade Iraq. While Bill Clinton may have gotten the same intelligence assessments, Clinton determined that, while Iraq could pose a threat to the Middle East, it was not a serious threat to the United States. Bill Clinton did not send us into war with Iraq.
George Bush did.
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