George Bush Lied

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing the Memo­r­ial Day edi­to­r­ial from the Min­neapo­lis Star Tri­bune. You should read it, too.

[Update: The orig­i­nal Strib edi­to­r­ial is now behind their paid archive, but I posted the full text below.]

First off, kudos to a major news orga­ni­za­tion for hav­ing the will to do this, and on Memo­r­ial Day, to boot. I wish more peo­ple with posi­tions of power and respon­si­bil­ity would do the same.

George Bush know­ingly bent the truth to his own ends, but the Amer­i­can peo­ple don’t care. And for the life of me, I can­not fig­ure out why they don’t care. Oh, wait no, they *do* care… about gas prices. Not about Bush’s aborted AIDS in Africa pro­gram. Not about inno­cent civil­ians dead around the world due to our direct action. Not about Bush’s admin­is­tra­tors receiv­ing acco­lades and medals while young Amer­i­cans die over­seas due to their incom­pe­tent (lack of) deci­sion mak­ing. Not about America’s moral stand­ing in the world crushed under the weight of sanc­tioned tor­ture. No, we care about gas prices that are still among the low­est in the world.

Words fail me.

Update: Here is the text of the edi­to­r­ial (also as a text file):

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN - startribune.com
Last update: May 29, 2005 at 7:25 PM

Edi­to­r­ial: Memo­r­ial Day/Praise brav­ery, seek for­give­ness
Pub­lished May 30, 2005

Noth­ing young Amer­i­cans can do in life is more hon­or­able than offer­ing them­selves for the defense of their nation. It requires great self­less­ness and sac­ri­fice, and quite pos­si­bly the for­fei­ture of life itself. On Memo­r­ial Day 2005, we gather to remem­ber all those who gave us that ulti­mate gift. Because they are so fresh in our minds, those who have died in Iraq make a spe­cial claim on our thoughts and our prayers.

In exchange for our uni­formed young people’s will­ing­ness to offer the gift of their lives, civil­ian Amer­i­cans owe them some­thing impor­tant: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sac­ri­fice unless it is truly nec­es­sary for the secu­rity of the coun­try. In the case of Iraq, the Amer­i­can pub­lic has failed them; we did not pre­vent the Bush admin­is­tra­tion from spend­ing their blood in an unnec­es­sary war based on con­trived con­cerns about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruc­tion. Pres­i­dent Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes. Per­haps it hap­pened because Amer­i­cans, under­stand­ably, don’t expect untruths from those in power. But that works bet­ter as an expla­na­tion than as an excuse.

The “smok­ing gun,” as some call it, sur­faced on May 1 in the Lon­don Times. It is a highly clas­si­fied doc­u­ment con­tain­ing the min­utes of a July 23, 2002, meet­ing at 10 Down­ing Street in which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vice, reported to Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair on talks he’d just held in Wash­ing­ton. His mis­sion was to deter­mine the Bush administration’s inten­tions toward Iraq.

At a time when the White House was say­ing it had “no plans” for an inva­sion, the British doc­u­ment says Dearlove reported that there had been “a per­cep­ti­ble shift in atti­tude” in Wash­ing­ton. “Mil­i­tary action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Sad­dam, through mil­i­tary action, jus­ti­fied by the con­junc­tion of ter­ror­ism and WMD. But the intel­li­gence and facts were being fixed around the pol­icy. The (National Secu­rity Coun­cil) had no patience with the U.N. route, and no enthu­si­asm for pub­lish­ing mate­r­ial on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was lit­tle dis­cus­sion in Wash­ing­ton of the after­math after mil­i­tary action.”

It turns out that for­mer coun­tert­er­ror­ism chief Richard Clarke and for­mer Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Paul O’Neill were right. Both have been pil­lo­ried for writ­ing that by sum­mer 2002 Bush had already decided to invade.

Wal­ter Pin­cus, writ­ing in the Wash­ing­ton Post on May 22, pro­vides fur­ther evi­dence that the admin­is­tra­tion did, indeed, fix the intel­li­gence on Iraq to fit a pol­icy it had already embraced: inva­sion and regime change. Just four days before Bush’s State of the Union address in Jan­u­ary 2003, Pin­cus writes, the National Secu­rity Coun­cil staff “put out a call for new intel­li­gence to bol­ster claims” about Sad­dam Hussein’s WMD pro­grams. The call went out because the NSC staff believed the case was weak. More­over, Pin­cus says, “as the war approached, many U.S. intel­li­gence ana­lysts were inter­nally ques­tion­ing almost every major piece of pre­war intel­li­gence about Hussein’s alleged weapons pro­grams.” But no one at high ranks in the admin­is­tra­tion would lis­ten to them.

On the day before Bush’s speech, the CIA’s Berlin sta­tion chief warned that the source for some of what Bush would say was untrust­wor­thy. Bush said it any­way. He based part of his most impor­tant annual speech to the Amer­i­can peo­ple on a sin­gle, dubi­ous, unnamed source. The source was later found to have fab­ri­cated his information.

Also comes word, from the May 19 New York Times, that senior U.S. mil­i­tary lead­ers are not encour­aged about prospects in Iraq. Yes, they think the United States can pre­vail, but as one said, it may take “many years.”

As this bloody month of car bombs and Amer­i­can deaths — the most since Jan­u­ary — comes to a close, as we gather in groups small and large to honor our war dead, let us all sing of their brav­ery and sac­ri­fice. But let us also ask their for­give­ness for send­ing them to a war that should never have hap­pened. In the 1960s it was Viet­nam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mis­take again. Our young peo­ple are sim­ply too precious.

Copy­right 2005 Star Tri­bune.
All rights reserved.

Repub­lished here for edu­ca­tional purposes.