Lame duck President George W. Bush was interviewed by ABC's Charles Gibson on Dec. 1, 2008. It should have aired on NBC, because its most significant points were about the failure of his administration to keep track of the weapons of mass destruction in the world: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical.
Maybe that was not lost on the spin-meisters at the White House. Anyway, Bush admitted: "I think I was unprepared for war." He blames this lack of preparedness on failed intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
He still cannot own the mistake. Still, it was his Intel agencies who fed him bad data that caused him to make the bad decision. The Decider made the Wrong Decision. And he admitted, "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."
There was Right Intel available, that correctly pointed out that there were no WMD in Iraq. In an article by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon on Sept. 6, 2007, there is an exhaustive listing of the actual intelligence reports and their sources that Bush and his advisers could have drawn from, but ignored.
From Blumenthal's article: Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Saddam's foreign minister that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they (the White House) were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Not intelligence to expose the reality.
So George W. Bush feels he was not ready for war, and his intelligence service let down him and all the "Coalition of the Willing" countries who also agreed to send troops into the war for this trumped up reason. Mr. Bush has a short memory, it appears.
Read the Salon article linked above. It is boggling just how the administration fed the information the Decider wanted to hear to him and his cohort, and we are going to be paying for it for a long, long time.
Mr. Bush's unwillingness to read and listen to the actual intelligence reports has cost the US and the world dearly. Over a hundred thousand lives, and nearing a Trillion US dollars, with more spent by our "Coalition of the Duped" allies. The global recession is due in large part to Bush's war. History will record this.We, unfortunately, will have to live through it.
Or rather, we are the fortunate ones. We are, at least, alive.
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Llewellyn King
Pink Vigilantes
Behind Blue Eyes
Liz Emrich
Saturn Smith
Skip Williamson
Salon.com
Comments
the damage is too great to just shrug your shoulders, and say, "and now for the weather."
the political system of the united states generated a 'leader' and support team either grossly incompetent, or actually insane.
succeeding 'leaders' must put before the nation a plan to prevent these gross aberrations in competence or responsibility, or else join the bush regime in infamy.
i'm not going to hold my breath. politicians are commonly satisfied to get to the top of their career ladder, with no aspiration to actually amend the system that has already recognized their value.
the people? they will do nothing, for they have no convenient means of shaping government, and are raised to be passive, submissive, and ignorant.
dubya is an embarrassment, but not just to himself. every part of america contributed to his enthronement. their solution to this latest embarrassment will be the same as to previous ones: "look ahead!"
But we seem to have an epidemic of "it wasn't my fault" destroying our country. I cannot tell you how often I see individuals, bosses, clerks, doctors, and small town politicians refuse to see the obvious...or refuse to accept responsibility for screw-ups.
He's not alone in his denial. Let's give him that.
And we do not elect the staff at all, of course. So much decision making in Bush's administration went on for him, not by him. That needs fixing to. Bush's laughable "I'm the Decider" statement was most likely written by Karl Rove and spoken as Dick Cheney pulled the puppet strings.
We should all be thankful we have a learned man coming into the Oval Office in January. Let's see what sort of mistakes he will make. They cannot be more egregious than Bush's, that's for sure.
No, I can't put him on the same level as the local or state politicos, or bosses or companies, all of whom want to shrug off their guilt. What Bush accomplished has taken the country backwards decades in financial terms and cost families too many lives.
While fighting his imaginary WMD war in Iraq, he also ignored struggles elsewhere that screamed for attention; several genocidal wars occurred on his watch, for example. When an obvious need to intervene occurs (Darfur, for example,) Bush's response is listless; compare that to the "Shock and Awe" of the Iraq War.
Nope - I can't let him get off lightly. I'll leave that to you though. To each his own.