Bush Tells Helen Thomas Why He Invaded Iraq

I hope to see yesterday’s White House Press Conference lampooned on “South Park” one of these days. We have a prematurely senile (in addition to alcoholic and medicated) President Bush telling sharp-as-a-tack 85-year-old reporter Helen Thomas why he invaded Iraq. It may be GWB forgot he was on-camera. Or perhaps he thought that since Ms Thomas is old she had forgotten the last three years. Maybe the Prez thought, if he thought anything at all, that he’d mesmerized the whole world and no one had any memory of the Iraq invasion. CNN Transcript of the Helen Thomas part of the press conference: QUESTION from Helen Thomas: “I'd like to ask you, Mr. President -- your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, your Cabinet officers, former Cabinet officers, intelligence people and so forth -- but what's your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil, the quest for oil. It hasn't been Israel or anything else. What was it? BUSH: I think your premise, in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- that I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect. QUESTION (Helen Thomas): And... BUSH: Hold on for a second, please. Excuse me. Excuse me. No president wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed in September the 11th. When we got attacked, I vowed then and there to use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people. Our foreign policy changed on that day. You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life. And I'm never going to forget it. And I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people, that we will do everything in our power to protect our people. Part of that meant to make sure that we didn't allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy, and that's why I went into Iraq.” Well now, isn’t that interesting? The President didn’t want the war. Saddam denied the inspectors. And the president went into Iraq to make sure we didn’t provide a haven to the enemy. In fact, President Bush wanted to attack Iraq so badly that he authorized Colin Powell to lie in front of the UN to justify the war. Sadam Hussein did not deny access to the inspectors. The President himself provided a haven to the enemy that attacked the World Trade Centers. And the world is HUGELY less safe now than it was before Bush's war. By now, OJ Simpson has no doubt convinced himself he did not kill his wife. And in 1983 when already impaired President Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal he’d been a US Army photographer assigned to film Nazi death camps, he certainly believed it, even though he didn’t set foot in Germany during WWII and had spent the entire war in Hollywood. And President Bush, given his mental disorders, may believe the hogwash he hands out during speeches and press conferences. But like all liars, he forgets what he said the last time he lied. In June 2003, the BBC reported that President George W. Bush told Mahmood Abbas (now Palestinian Authority president) that he went to war in Iraq because God told him to. "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did,” Bush said. In his speech to the United Nations in September 2003, the Prez said, “because a coalition of nations acted to defend the peace, and the credibility of the United Nations, Iraq is free.” Scratch the God stuff. We attacked Iraq to defend the UN. In December 2005 the Prez said, “We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place.” Scratch the God and UN stuff. We attacked Iraq to give it democracy. And yesterday, scratch the God, UN and democracy stuff. The Prez said we attacked Iraq to make the US safe from enemies. Neither Helen Thomas nor the entire population of the United States will ever hear the real reason we attacked Iraq from anyone in the White House. The reason changes from day to day according to the spinning needs of the moment. But the real reason we attacked Iraq was because it was an easy first step in the neocons’ grandiose plan for the US to own the world. And what’s the upshot? The world owns the US.