Bush and the British

(I realized that I haven't been posting my columns... Here goes!)

(oh, and this is another one of the "Faceoff" columns - click for Holli's opposing view)

What will it take? What will finally make President Bush have to own up to lying to get us into a war? What will it take for those who support him unquestioningly to start thinking a little bit about their man?

Maybe a White House tape, a la Nixon, with Bush admitting his administration was going to go to war, no matter what reasons they had to make up? Not a "smoking gun" memo from the head of British Intelligence, that's for sure.

Not that war with Iraq was a surprise. It's been a matter of record for years now that Bush and company were bucking for war with Iraq before he was even elected. When he ignored warnings from his predecessor's staff and dropped the ball on Osama bin Laden, it was a simple matter to tie in the unplanned War on Terror (no, I'm not suggesting a 9-11 conspiracy) with existing plans to topple Saddam Hussein.

And what of that British memo, the one that's the minutes of a July, 2002 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his security advisors? It plainly states that the Bush administration had decided to go to war, and was "fixing the intelligence and facts" to support that decision.

That's from our staunchest ally, folks. Blair met with Bush at his Crawford, Texas ranch, and was told, in no uncertain terms, that we were going in. Weapons inspectors or no. Hussein complies with the U.N. or no. We're Americans, and we're going to kick some butt!

Except that 1,500 of our finest have paid with their lives. The revelations that our own inspectors called off the search after not finding any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the stated (and false) rationale for going to war, registered barely a blip in the news.

Being wrong is one thing - not that the president's ever apologized for a the huge error, or any error for that matter. Making up a threat from whole cloth is an entirely different matter, one that more and more people are finding just as impeachable as lying about oral sex.

"Liberal media" indeed. I think I may be the only one, and I confine my views to this page. And before you start calling Soundoff and saying "Clinton thought Saddam had smallpox, too!" keep in mind this - he never sent us to war against them. Nobody came home in a flag-draped coffin.

The biggest irony of it all? The war may have put the capacity for WMDs in the hands of "evil-doers." According to Friday's news reports, there are sites in Iraq that had machinery that could be used for WMDs that now don't. They're empty, looted.

"My Bush, right or wrong"-ers, hush up. This isn't proof that Iraq had WMDs. Let's do some thinking and analysis (y'know, what should have been done pre-war).

The stuff was under U.N. seal. The Iraqis weren't touching it. Unfortunately, U.S. forces didn't secure these sites.

Worst case scenario: this equipment is now in the free and clear, being used for Very Bad Things. Best (and hopefully most likely) case: it's been broken into scrap to pay for a meal for some starving Iraqi.

But all that happens in the real world, where the "waning" Iraqi insurgency has killed 80 U.S. soldiers and 700 of their countrymen last month. Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, a Republican said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is misleading the public about the insurgency's strength, by the way.

Repeating lies doesn't make them true, except maybe in the fantasy land that much of the country's descended into.