was published on Thursday, as usual.
Also available online at:
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2008/01/25/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis43.txtReport documents deception behind war
By Rich Lewis, Sentinel Columnist, January 24, 2008
Last updated: Thursday, January 24, 2008 2:41 PM EST
Watching the news the other night, I saw a bit of film of President Bush speaking at some conference. I turned to my wife and said, half-jokingly, "Oh, is he still president?"
I say “half-jokingly” because Bush, indeed, has become shockingly irrelevant. Sure, all lame-duck presidents lose power and prestige as the voters and their parties look to the next election. But Bush hasn’t weakened, he has evaporated, leaving behind a thick mist of bad memories and unresolved troubles.
Bush was never prepared or qualified to be president, and we should be happy enough to see him disappear, but it is somehow infuriating that he may never be called to account for the damage he has done.
Which brings us to the war in Iraq.
The war has not become irrelevant by any means, but it has become somewhat invisible. Banner headlines and endless “special reports” made us all aware that an actor named Heath Ledger died this week. But you may not have been so aware that Justin R. Whiting, Cameron Babcock, Richard Burress and Jon Schoolcraft also died this week - all of them U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, four of the 27 killed this month and of the almost 4,000 killed since the war began.
Nor that Munthar Muhrej Radhi, the dean of Iraq’s premier dental school, was gunned down yesterday - one of dozens of professors murdered in recent years, just a small part of the approximately 160,000 non-combatant Iraqi civilians killed overall.
The war grinds on, but we hardly notice it any more - unless, of course, you happened to know one of the victims, say, Richard Burress, a 25-year-old specialist from Florida who was killed by an IED and left behind a young daughter.
And unlike Bush, the war he started has not faded away and won’t expire at the end of his term. It will drag on for many years, with more deaths and injuries, more refugees and more billions of dollars lost, stolen or wasted. No wonder we want to just forget it’s there.
About 60 percent of Americans now believe it was a mistake to go to war in Iraq at all, but that regret is meaningless. No one has a clue about how to get us out.
It just doesn’t seem right that Bush, the even-more-irrelevant Dick Cheney or any of the schemers who instigated this disaster should be allowed to just “fade away” into comfortable retirement, leaving the rest of us to pay for their deceits and incompetence.
Some kind of crime has been committed here and some kind of punishment beyond the loss of public prestige seems called for.
That point was made clear again this week with the release of a new study by The Center for Public Integrity, a “non-profit, non-partisan and non-advocacy organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern.”
Titled “False Pretenses,” the study is described as “the first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric” emanating from the White House. The first paragraph leaves no doubt the government abused its authority and betrayed our trust:
“President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.... (A)n exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
The center’s meticulous examination of public records shows that Bush “made 232 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda.... Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and (former Bush press secretary Ari) Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by (former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul) Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and (former press secretary Scott) McClellan (with 14).”
The study juxtaposes what Bush and the others were saying for public consumption “against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis.”
The study, available online (www.publicintegrity.org), is fully searchable so you can see for yourself whether the authors have evaluated the material fairly.
Not only have all the officials mentioned here escaped any punishment for their deceptions, they have “so far largely avoided the harsh, sustained glare of formal scrutiny about their personal responsibility for the litany of repeated, false statements in the run-up to the war in Iraq.... Congressional oversight has focused almost entirely on the quality of the U.S. government’s pre-war intelligence - not the judgment, public statements, or public accountability of its highest officials.”
And it may never happen. Bush and Cheney will not be impeached; they will not go to jail or even be locked in a small room forever and forced to watch film of people shot, bombed, mutilated; families torn apart; homes destroyed; whole cities reduced to rubble.
They deserve all that and more.
Instead, they will just become irrelevant.
And we will be at war.
Rich Lewis's e-mail address is: rlcolumn@comcast.net
Correction: Cameron Babcock was not killed in Iraq. He lost his life at Twentynine Palms Military Facility in California after returning from Iraq.
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