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C&P: A Cynical Manipulation
HAIRY
Member Posts: 23,606
U.N. resolutions are hardly a cause of war
Israel is in violation of more than 60 U.N. resolutions..
Bush seems to exist in a deluded state of mind ... (he) is a mental and moral midget
A Cynical Manipulation
by Charley Reese
For Wednesday, February 18, 2004
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040218/index.php
Following President Bush's hour-long interview with NBC's Tim Russert, we can now state conclusively that President Bush deliberately misled the American people and continues to do so.
Item: Bush claims he was acting on the best intelligence there was when he decided to go to war.
Fact: The intelligence given to Bush was full of warnings, caveats, disagreements and doubts as to its reliability. All of this was expunged, and Bush and his crew stated as a dead certainty that Saddam Hussein had a large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
The aluminum tubes, for example, were claimed by Bush to be necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The State Department intelligence people and the Energy Department intelligence people flatly disagreed. They also expressed disagreement about the prospects of Iraq developing a nuclear weapon.
Even the CIA warned Bush that the report of Iraq's attempt to buy yellow cake from Niger was unreliable, but it went into the president's State of the Union speech anyway.
Item: Bush repeated his claim that Iraq was in violation of Security Council resolutions.
Fact: If indeed there are no weapons of mass destruction, as it now appears there are not, then Iraq had complied with U.N. resolutions. The Iraqis had been saying for years that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and they were just called liars by American administrations. Moreover, Israel is in violation of more than 60 U.N. resolutions. Thus, U.N. resolutions are hardly a cause of war.
Item: Bush says that Saddam Hussein was a madman and that a madman "can't be contained."
Fact: Saddam Hussein had been successfully contained since 1991. Since the first Gulf War, Saddam had not attacked anyone, fired any weapons at any of his neighbors or threatened to attack anyone.
Item: Bush claimed that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors as well as to the United States and its friends (read Israel).
Fact: All of the countries adjacent to Iraq said publicly during the buildup to war that they did not, I say again, did not consider Iraq a threat.
Item: Bush keeps repeating that Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction.
Fact: That was true. They were used in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War and not since. One can easily say the same thing of the United States. We used weapons of mass destruction - nukes during World War II and poison gases during World War I. Other facts Bush omits are that during the Iran-Iraq War, the United States was backing Saddam Hussein, and the U.S. intelligence agencies published a report exonerating Iraq from the gas attack that killed a village of Kurds.
Item: Bush claims his administration has been "extraordinarily cooperative" with the commission examining the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Fact: There has been news story after news story about the Bush White House's extraordinary lack of cooperation and stonewalling. Bush, of course, admits to never reading any newspapers, so perhaps he is just disconnected from reality.
One could go on and on. Bush does not seem to grasp that a policy of pre-emptive wars requires dead-on accurate intelligence. Despite all the errors in his so-called war on terrorism, Bush has not fired a single person. He absolutely refuses to hold himself or anybody in his administration accountable.
Furthermore, he does not seem to grasp the enormous damage he has done to the image and credibility of the United States. Bush seems to exist in a deluded state of mind in which he imagines himself as Roosevelt or Churchill confronting global evil. That's a dangerous state of mind for a president. Compared with those two leaders, Bush is a mental and moral midget.
There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue.
Don't assume malice for what stupidity can explain.
Israel is in violation of more than 60 U.N. resolutions..
Bush seems to exist in a deluded state of mind ... (he) is a mental and moral midget
A Cynical Manipulation
by Charley Reese
For Wednesday, February 18, 2004
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040218/index.php
Following President Bush's hour-long interview with NBC's Tim Russert, we can now state conclusively that President Bush deliberately misled the American people and continues to do so.
Item: Bush claims he was acting on the best intelligence there was when he decided to go to war.
Fact: The intelligence given to Bush was full of warnings, caveats, disagreements and doubts as to its reliability. All of this was expunged, and Bush and his crew stated as a dead certainty that Saddam Hussein had a large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
The aluminum tubes, for example, were claimed by Bush to be necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The State Department intelligence people and the Energy Department intelligence people flatly disagreed. They also expressed disagreement about the prospects of Iraq developing a nuclear weapon.
Even the CIA warned Bush that the report of Iraq's attempt to buy yellow cake from Niger was unreliable, but it went into the president's State of the Union speech anyway.
Item: Bush repeated his claim that Iraq was in violation of Security Council resolutions.
Fact: If indeed there are no weapons of mass destruction, as it now appears there are not, then Iraq had complied with U.N. resolutions. The Iraqis had been saying for years that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and they were just called liars by American administrations. Moreover, Israel is in violation of more than 60 U.N. resolutions. Thus, U.N. resolutions are hardly a cause of war.
Item: Bush says that Saddam Hussein was a madman and that a madman "can't be contained."
Fact: Saddam Hussein had been successfully contained since 1991. Since the first Gulf War, Saddam had not attacked anyone, fired any weapons at any of his neighbors or threatened to attack anyone.
Item: Bush claimed that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors as well as to the United States and its friends (read Israel).
Fact: All of the countries adjacent to Iraq said publicly during the buildup to war that they did not, I say again, did not consider Iraq a threat.
Item: Bush keeps repeating that Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction.
Fact: That was true. They were used in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War and not since. One can easily say the same thing of the United States. We used weapons of mass destruction - nukes during World War II and poison gases during World War I. Other facts Bush omits are that during the Iran-Iraq War, the United States was backing Saddam Hussein, and the U.S. intelligence agencies published a report exonerating Iraq from the gas attack that killed a village of Kurds.
Item: Bush claims his administration has been "extraordinarily cooperative" with the commission examining the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Fact: There has been news story after news story about the Bush White House's extraordinary lack of cooperation and stonewalling. Bush, of course, admits to never reading any newspapers, so perhaps he is just disconnected from reality.
One could go on and on. Bush does not seem to grasp that a policy of pre-emptive wars requires dead-on accurate intelligence. Despite all the errors in his so-called war on terrorism, Bush has not fired a single person. He absolutely refuses to hold himself or anybody in his administration accountable.
Furthermore, he does not seem to grasp the enormous damage he has done to the image and credibility of the United States. Bush seems to exist in a deluded state of mind in which he imagines himself as Roosevelt or Churchill confronting global evil. That's a dangerous state of mind for a president. Compared with those two leaders, Bush is a mental and moral midget.
There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue.
Don't assume malice for what stupidity can explain.
Comments
by Charley Reese
February 25, 2004
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040225/index.php
U.S. policy toward the most destabilizing factor in the Middle East - the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - is to support Israel and to never offend the Israeli lobby.
U.S. politicians use a number of rhetorical devices to disguise this policy, since it guarantees not only a continuation of the conflict, but a continuing supply of terrorists and an increasing hostility toward American foreign policy in the region. They use rhetoric to pretend to be interested in a solution.
For example, they do not call things by their correct names. East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza are not "disputed territories," nor are they Judea and Samaria. They are occupied territories. They were occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. There is a long-standing United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Israel to return those territories to the Palestinians.
The proper name for Jewish settlements in the occupied territory is "illegal" settlements. The Geneva Accords, to which Israel is a signatory, forbid the settlement of occupied territory, as well as the expulsion of the native population.
The proper name for Israeli tactics, such as the demolition of homes, the destruction of agricultural property, the confiscation of property, the imposition of curfews, the assassination of political opponents and the blocking of roads, is "collective punishment," which in most parts of the world is a considered a war crime. No civilized country punishes innocent people for the misdeeds of an individual. No civilized country condones murder.
Another rhetorical device American politicians - without a doubt the most cowardly in the world - hide behind is the proposition that the "parties involved must reach a settlement." This is the equivalent of a cop showing up at the door of a family whose 6-year-old daughter has been raped and saying, "Your daughter and her rapist will have to work this out between themselves."
There is such an enormous disparity in power - Israel has all of it, and the Palestinians have none - that to put the burden on Palestinians to negotiate with their oppressors is obscenely unrealistic. It is exactly the same as if President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had said to Poland, after it was invaded and conquered by the Nazis, "You'll have to negotiate a settlement with the Third Reich."
It is even more obscenely unrealistic to tell the Palestinians that they are responsible for the security of Israel. The Palestinians, of course, have no state, no army, no air force and no nothing, while Israel is ranked by many as being among the top 10 of military powers in the world.
It is Israel, under international law, as the occupier that has the responsibility to provide security for the Palestinians. That, of course, is a laugh. For 37 years Israel has ruled the Palestinians in the occupied territories as a conquered people with essentially no rights at all.
Finally, one of the things that most infuriates people in the Arab world is the habit of American politicians taking note of every Israeli death while ignoring the far more numerous deaths of Palestinians. The death of any human being is a cause for grief, but the American habit of ignoring Palestinian suffering leaves the impression that Americans consider Jewish lives far more valuable than Palestinian lives. And the truth is, many Americans do.
You will note that all of the Democratic candidates avoid talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or if they can't avoid it, they make the ritualistic pledge of undying support for Israel.
This is no way for a great power to act. The effect of this enormous act of political cowardice on the American people is that we will have to live with the terrorism it has already spawned and will continue to spawn for generations and generations to come. The price of American political cowardice is the blood of innocent people.
c 2004 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue.
Don't assume malice for what stupidity can explain.