So Bush finally admits what the rest of knew before the war, that the intelligence about Saddam’s WMD was wrong. Here wrong should be read as ‘made up’, but don’t push the guy.
In his latest speech to rally the American people to the cause of spreading democracy and compliance by shooting people and blowing things up, Bush, having made this confession, goes on to say that the war was still the right thing because Saddam was a threat. The fact is, there is even less evidence that Saddam was a threat than there was evidence for his WMD — There isn’t even any made up evidence.
The notion that Iraq, battered by wars with Iran and the US-led world coalition, strangled by sanctions for ten years with an outdated, dilapidated military was a threat to anyone but itself is laughable. The idea brings to mind JFK’s claims in the early 60s that tiny Cuba was a threat to the Western way of life. Kennedy tried to get the governments of his regional allies to spin the same story. The Mexican ambassador declined, explaining that millions of his countrymen would die laughing.
Saddam was a not a nice leader. Let’s not get that wrong, but what kind of moral calculus makes killing tens of thousands of people to remove one man from power worthwhile? Let’s say this gently, we don’t want to cause Bush a mental relapse: dead people are not liberated, they are, well, dead. The dead, dear George, don’t participate in a free and fair democracy because they are … dead.
The invasion of Iraq and the deaths of tens of thousands of people all came about from faulty information, says George. If anyone else made a decision at work based on faulty information that led to death and injury, that person would be tried for negligent manslaughter. Not so George Jnr. He just goes on babbling in his confusion “America did not choose this war” as if his intelligence failure was somehow the fault of the Iraqi people.