The Crumbling Credibility of the Bush Administration

The Crumbling Credibility of the Bush Administration

The President's Case for War Disintegrates

Thanks to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, we know that President Bush was plotting a war against Iraq from day one of his administration. O'Neill, in the recently published book, Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, also revealed that the president and his top aides were not interested in hearing factual advice, but only what they wanted to hear.

And, thanks to Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, we have known for months that the administration's decision to make weapons of mass destruction (WMD) the prime justification for going to war was made for "bureaucratic" reasons. It was the only thing upon which the warmongers in the Bush Administration could agree. Now, after watching every assertion the administration made for going to war proved wrong, it is abundantly clear there was never any reason to launch an unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

Now, in the face of growing discontent and distrust among the American people, they are now trying to convince us that what we heard is not what they said. The fact is, as he relentlessly pushed the nation into war, President Bush and his cohorts made repeated and unequivocal pronouncements that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and war was necessary because Iraq posed an "imminent," "immediate," "urgent" or "mortal" threat to the United States. Now the president is telling us we had to go to war because Iraq was NOT an imminent threat.

" … When we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent," he told the nation on NBC's "Meet the Press. "It's too late if they become imminent."

Throughout the rush to war, the Bush Administration made dire claims about Iraq's imminent threat in spite of repeated warnings from U.S. and international intelligence agencies that their claims were weak, fabricated or wrong.

The administration was repeatedly told there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq was stockpiling and producing chemical weapons. They were also told that "a substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions." Last month, the administration's chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, resigned and confirmed what the intelligence community had been saying all along.

President Bush recently appointed an "independent" commission to uncover "all the facts'' about why prewar intelligence about Iraq was so very wrong. The commission members were handpicked by the president, he excused himself from testifying and the commission is not required to complete its probe until next year, months after the November elections. Britain will also investigate the intelligence used to justify going to war in Iraq, but the British panel will complete its probe in July.

Unfortunately, neither panel is focused on the right aspect of prewar Iraqi intelligence data. They should be investigating why the Bush Administration chose to ignore intelligence information that was not so very wrong at all.

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Kenneth Pollack, a former official with the National Security Council, said that administration officials set up their own group in the Pentagon, and "cherry-picked the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the administration's pre-existing position and ignoring all the others."

Obviously, this president rushed into war before UN weapons inspectors could confirm what the Bush Administration already knew: Iraq had no threatening arsenal of WMD.

No one wants to believe an American president would send American military men and women to be killed and maimed in a war based on a web of lies and deceit. However, based on the facts, no other conclusion can be reached. President Bush has betrayed the trust of the American people and should be held accountable.