Four Years Ago the Idiot in Chief Attacked Iraq

Yesterday morning, on the 4th anniversary of the start of the most insane and ultimately most costly and unnecessary war in the history of the United States, President George W. Bush gave a “statement” to commemorate the day he launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom to remove Saddam Hussein from power”. It was a mercifully short eight-minute speech during which Bush said, “There's been good progress” in Iraq. And again, like a robot with a programming glitch, he linked 9/11 with the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. He said, “If American forces were to step back from Baghdad before it is more secure, a contagion of violence could spill out across the entire country. In time, this violence could engulf the region. The terrorists could emerge from the chaos with a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they had in Afghanistan, which they used to plan the attacks of September the 11th, 2001. For the safety of the American people, we cannot allow this to happen.” In the face of the bitter truth that we lost the war in Iraq shortly after we invaded Iraq, President George W. Bush said, four years later, “We can win the war in Iraq.” Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley had obviously read the speech because he mouthed the same ridiculous revisionist nonsense and fantasies on ABC’s “This Week” show this past Sunday. Hadley said, “The Iraqi people would say they are better off now than under Saddam Hussein." When confronted by the show’s host George Stephanopoulos with the negative results of last week’s poll of 2200 Iraqis conducted in partnership with ABC/BBC/USA Today and Germany’s ARD Network, Hadley said there was a reason why only 18% of Iraqis have confidence in US troops. And what is that reason Mr. Hadley? Hadley said, “It’s because the US presence hasn’t brought security to the Iraqi people.” But the people are better off? Pull your head out of your ass, or Bush’s ass, or wherever it’s been hiding for the past four years, Hadley. The Iraqi people have no jobs, they have no electricity, they have no water, and they have no sewer system. More than 60,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. More than 2 million Iraqis have fled Iraq. Fifty-one percent of the Iraqi people overall have no confidence in the government foisted on them by the United States. One-hundred percent of the Iraqi’s in Baghdad have no confidence in the US troops. And yet, George W. Bush said in his speech on March 19th, “The operation is still in the early stages, it’s still in the beginning stages… there will be good days, and there will be bad days ahead as the security plan unfolds.” WHAT?!!!!!? It’s been FOUR YEARS, you ignorant lunatic. Your recent surge and pleas for patience are after four years of total failure, death, mayhem, chaos and destruction. And to compound the revisionist history as written by George W. Bush and Stephen Hadley, they say the war in Iraq was embarked on to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. On March 21 2003, then-press secretary Ari Fleisher answered a question about whether the President had thought of the innocent Iraqis who would be killed in Iraq. Fleisher said yes, the president had thought of that, but, he added, “The other portion of what the President remembers when he thinks about the innocents are the 3,000 innocents who lost their lives on September 11th in the United States. And if it were not for the worries that the President had about an Iraqi regime, in defiance of the United Nations, possessing weapons of mass destruction, which he fears could again be used against the United States, you might not see this developing.” And that’s how the Bush administration manipulated the US into waging war in Iraq. It was George W. Bush who was in defiance of the UN, not Iraq who was in defiance of the UN. Chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Hans Blix said, "I don't think it is reasonable to close the door on inspections (in Iraq) after three and a half months." It was because the Bush administration knowingly lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction that the US attacked Iraq. It was because the Bush administration falsely linked 9/11 to Saddam Hussein that the US attacked Iraq. It was because the Bush administration had decided the weakest nation in the Middle East was Iraq and that Iraq was the best place to start its plan to take over the Middle East's oil that the US attacked Iraq. The war in Iraq has never been about Saddam Hussein, regime change, or bringing democracy to the Middle East. And certainly, the war was not started in Iraq to protect the American people from terrorists. Because the terrorists did not have a foothold in Iraq until the US launched its attack. CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin made a lovely Freudian slip last night on Lou Dobbs Tonight. The subject was whether Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials could be subpoenaed to testify in public about the firing of the US attorneys. Toobin made the point that it wasn’t like the old days when the Republicans were in power in Congress. He said, “This administration has had a docile Congress for six years, and now they're starting to learn what it's like to have some oversight. And it's been a pretty rocky on-the-john, er, on-the-job training for them.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. The Bush administration’s on-the-john training has come to an end.