Criminal Revisionists

by shep

In a May 4 op-ed aptly titled Rewriting History, Charles Krauthammer claims that President Bush’s public position was that the WMD and terrorist threats posed by Iraq were not imminent. To support this ridiculous assertion, Mr. Krauthammer points to a single line from the president’s 2003 State of the Union speech, which took place after more than a year of alarmist rhetoric from President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials, clearly designed to convince the public that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a dire and imminent threat.

Nevertheless, those who always doubted that Iraq posed such a threat were still left to wonder why we had to force busy UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq so we could rush to war in March of 2003. Why did we have to invade and occupy Iraq without the full support of the UN and all of our NATO allies, along with a significant number of Arab nations, similar to what George H. W. Bush managed to assemble for the Gulf War?

It is quite likely that our poor justification in international law, weak “coalition of the willing” and lack of Muslim Arab participation in this endeavor played a fundamental role in its tragic failure.

Obviously, the main reason behind this poorly planned and supported rush to war in the spring of 2003, was for the possible benefit to George Bush and other Republicans in the 2004 elections (Heckuva job, Rovie!).

Today, another of the founding neocon blackguards continued their miserable attempt to whitewash the fact that they are 100% responsible for taking the country into a disastrous, illegal war in Iraq, by trying to pin the blame on George Tenet. Say what you will about Tenet’s cowardice and self-seeking, Richard Perle’s balls should turn black and fall off for this outrageous blame-shifting:

“George Tenet and, more important, our premier intelligence organization managed to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist while failing to find links to terrorists that did -- all while missing completely the rise of Islamist fundamentalism.”

Leaving aside the fact that it was chiefly the neocons and their Iraqi National Congress co-conspirators who created most of the bullshit about both Iraqi WMDs and supposed “links to terrorists,” what about “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”, did anyone else miss? As Richard Clarke and others have documented, while al Qaeda operatives finished their preparations to fly loaded airliners into the twin towers, Bush and the neocons were too busy planning their war for oil and hegemony in the Middle East to lift a finger to try to stop them, even as the Clarke and the CIA warned them that the threat was imminent.

It was the neoconservative bastards who ignored the Wahhabist threat until it was too late, took the country into disaster based on lies, and facilitated the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and thousands of US soldiers - so far. Tell me again why they are given a prominent voice in our public media, rather than an 8 x 10’ cell.