In
his chaotic two-year presidency,
Bush has pushed the Big Lie
approach so far that we are
seeing dramatic signs of its
cracking: an international
backlash, a domestic peace
movement and whistle-blowing from
inside our own intelligence and
diplomatic corps. |
Tuesday, March 4, 2003Even
some in government can no longer be silent
in the face of falsehood Bush
Pushes the Big Lie Toward the Brink
by Robert
Scheer SO THE truth is out:
George W. Bush lied when he claimed
to be worried about Iraq's alleged weapons
of mass destruction. Otherwise, Iraq's
stepped-up cooperation with the U.N. on
disarmament would be stunningly good news,
obviating the need to rush to
war. Instead, the U.N. weapons inspectors'
verification of Iraq's destruction of
missiles, private meetings with Iraqi
weapons scientists, visits to locations
where biological and chemical weapons were
destroyed in 1991 and a series of
unfettered flights by U2 spy plans have
been met with a shrug and sneer in
Washington. The White House line is that
even if the Iraqis destroy all their
slingshots, Goliath is still bringing his
tanks and instituting "regime change." The
arrogance is breathtaking. We have
demanded that a country disarm -- and even
as it is doing so, we say it doesn't
matter: it's too late; we're coming in.
Put down your guns and await the
slaughter. Abraham Lincoln once observed
that even a free people can be fooled for
a time -- and this, mind you, was long
before Fox News existed -- and in his
chaotic two-year presidency, Bush has
pushed the Big Lie approach so far that we
are seeing dramatic signs of its cracking:
an international backlash, a domestic
peace movement and whistle-blowing from
inside our own intelligence and diplomatic
corps. "We have not seen such systematic
distortion of intelligence, such
systematic manipulation of the American
people, since the war in Vietnam," wrote
John Brady Kiesling, a 20-year
veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service in his
letter of resignation last week to
Secretary of State Colin Powell. Kiesling,
who was political counselor in U.S.
embassies throughout the Mideast, added
that "until this administration, it had
been possible to believe that by upholding
the policies of my president, I was also
upholding the interests of the American
people and the world. I believe it no
longer." And this brave man is not the
only one who has caught on. The entire
world is astonished that our president
is lying not about a personal
indiscretion but about the most sacred
duty of the leader of the most powerful
nation in human history not to
recklessly endanger the lives of his
own or the world's people. Yet lie he
has. The first lie, claimed outright, was
that Iraq aided and abetted the Sept. 11
terrorists. There is no evidence at all
for this claim. It is also interesting to
note that not a single leading Al Qaeda
operative has turned out to be Iraqi. The
latest to be nabbed, Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed, was living in Pakistan, was
raised in Kuwait and studied engineering
-- and presumably the physics of
explosives -- at a college in North
Carolina. The second lie was that Iraq's alleged
weapons of mass destruction represent an
imminent threat to U.S. security. Despite
the most hugely expensive but secret
high-tech spy operation in human history
-- estimated by most at well over $100
billion a year -- and a vast network of
defectors and spies, we have not been able
to find their supposed weapons. The third and most dangerous lie is
that our mission now is to bring lasting
peace to the Mideast by a devastating
invasion of Iraq, which will end, as the
president outlined last week, in U.S.
dominance over the structure of government
and politics throughout the region. After
abandoning promising efforts by the
previous administration to create peace
between Israel and the Palestinians, the
Bush team now claims that changing Muslim
governments around the world will end the
downward spiral of violence there. Which
leads us to another lie: that this is all
good for our ally, Israel -- the claim of
the cabal of neoconservative ideologues
running our Mideast policy. In fact,
however, Israel will be placed in a
terribly dangerous position, serving as a
fig leaf for U.S. ambitions, further
ensuring that it remain forever an
isolated military garrison. This construction of a new world order
comes from a naive
and untraveled president,
emboldened in his ignorance by advisors
who have been plotting an aggressive Pax
Americana ever since the Soviet bloc's
collapse. Bush insiders Richard Perle,
Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Paul
Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld
are all members of something called the
Project for a New American Century
that has been pushing for a U.S. redesign
of the Mideast since 1997. After Sept. 11,
they seized on our national tragedy as a
way to enlist George W. in support of
their grand design. Not only was this
reckless scheme never mentioned by Bush
during the election campaign, it was the
sort of thing renounced as
"nation-building," something he would
never support. Yet another lie. |