Same President, New Lies (3/18/06)
by Dean T. Hartwell
The United States is nearly out of soldiers in Iraq, sending some soldiers back for second and third duties there. Furthermore, the Administration has sworn off the idea of a draft. But Bush and his supporters are calling out another possible foe, Iran.
Recently, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) proposed a resolution to United States Congress calling for the censure of President Bush for violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by wiretapping United States citizens without warrants. Ordinarily the President would respond by saying that such a proposal assists our enemies, like al-Qaeda or Iraq. Not this time. Instead, the Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist (R-TN), on the day of the resolution, said it was a good thing that “Iranians” did not hear what Senator Feingold said in censuring the President.
But this diversion of our attention to world events is nothing new. Bush has distracted us from the very beginning.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the President became tongue-tied in explaining why it happened and who we had to take revenge upon. He knew that fifteen of the nineteen accused hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, a United States ally. So, Bush diverted attention to Afghanistan and demanded that the Taliban there turn over Osama bin Laden.
Then he completed the process of making bin Laden the new “Darth Vader.” Just as other presidents put the same face on the Ayatollah Khomeini, Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein, Bush created a black-and-white view of the issue of who was to blame for what took place. He said he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.” But only months later he admitted that he really didn’t think that much about the new villain.
Take his explanation of going to war with Iraq in early 2003. He and his surrogates resurrected an old Darth Vader, Saddam Hussein, and said that Hussein’s Iraq had participated in September 11th and had ties to al-Qaeda. They went on to say that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and threatened the United States.
If one believed these lies, they might have concluded that Bush was an expert on Iraq. But the reality was that Bush did not know that the nation was divided into Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Without this knowledge, he had trouble putting together a plan for the aftermath of the war. And three years after the war began, the United States is still there, fighting to uphold the lies.
This deception has not been confined to comments about wars and enemy nations. A video recently came out that showed advisors, before Hurricane Katrina, telling Bush about the probability that the levees in New Orleans were going to break. He just sat there, never bothering to ask any questions.
Yet not long after the hurricane struck and the levees broke, killing hundreds of people, Bush claimed he did not have any reason to believe that would happen. Even when caught with this deception, Bush’s supporters parsed the words of the advisors and claimed to vindicate Bush. These were the same people who accused former President Clinton of parsing words in the Monica Lewinsky matter.
The President has pasted together the White House with a series of lies. Now with the revelations about Bush’s knowledge of the disaster Hurricane Katrina and his inaction, the wiretapping of United States citizens without warrants and the Dubai debacle over the plan to let them run some United States ports, the White House is coming apart like a house of cards. Of course, Bush could lie again and blame the Democrats for his own blunders. But this time the public will see through it.