Sunday, November 20, 2005

The Smoking Gun

The International Herald Tribune did a piece on the Congressional "debate" over Iraq withdrawal that included the following quote:


But Kingston [Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia] said Republicans forced the vote out of frustration with Democratic tactics. "We had just had it with Democrats running around saying President Bush lied. It was time for us to call their bluff," he said.


Remember Watergate. Up to the end, Republicans in Congress were saying that no one had found the "smoking gun." Then as now, the landscape was littered with bullet-riddled bodies, spent cartridges, and the smell of gunsmoke, but there were then, as there apparently are now, those who would dispute the sufficiency of the evidence.

What do they need? The LA Times is now reporting that German intelligence people, five of them, all confirm that Berlin warned Washington not to believe "Curveball," the Iraqi source who dreamed up some of the later discredited claims about Saddam's WMD.

Like Watergate, we have the original events and we have the coverup of those events. Bush is still telling the American people that all the world's intelligence services joined him in being wrong about Iraq. Clearly not true and three years after the fact, Bush knows it now whether he did at the time or not.

This comes under the heading of "everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten." It's not true and he knows it, but he says it anyway. That's called lying. President Bush lied about when he persuaded us that an invasion of Iraq was necessary. He is lying now about whether he lied about Iraq then. Mr. Kingston, you need to come to terms with that.

1 comment:

Joseph Hunkins said...

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidity"

Well, not so much stupidity as a neoconservative tendency to overlook conflicting evidence and boldly go where nobody has gone before or should go.

I still predict Iraq will shake out favorably for the long term for the Iraqis and there will be no civil war. Does this outcome justify the losses of life and cost of 300-400 billion? Very unlikely unless one maintains that this has averted an overwhelming terror attack.