Bush insults Americans by still linking Iraq to 9/11 attacks

obmar

Local columnists
Bush insults Americans by still linking Iraq to 9/11 attacks

September 22, 2006

Email this Print this BY MIKE SARAFA

I arrived home on the evening of 9/11/06 to a speech on television by President George W. Bush, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers.

After tributes to the fallen heroes and courageous survivors of that day, the president launched into a disconnected and surreal defense of the war against Iraq.

"The United States could not risk the threat posed by Iraq after 9/11," the president said. He went on to defend the American attack on Iraq as essential to homeland security.

The argument carried some water in the aftermath of 9/11, but the president's continued insistence, in the face of contrary evidence, that Iraq was connected to the 9/11 attacks is difficult to swallow. The president's constant revisionism five years after the fact -- and after the facts are even clearer -- is an insult to Americans.

We know from retired administration officials that the president was inexplicably fixated on Iraq in the hours and days after 9/11, belying the known facts at the time. We know that the face of the Iraqi resistance, Ahmed Chalabi, turned out to be an ineffectual opportunist who filled our intelligence gatherers with false information and misleading and overzealous expectations.

The American government, desperate for regime change in Iraq, pinned all its hopes for a new Iraq with Chalabi, who turned out to be a thug and a liar.

Five years ago, urgency trumped logic, revenge trumped accuracy and patriotism trumped caution. Even for those of us who felt the randomness of the march to war on Iraq, the ambiguity created by the 9/11 attacks and the horrific nature of Saddam's regime made the war difficult to oppose.

But five years later, we know better. Everyone knows better except, it seems, the president, his people, and the talking heads who carry the Bush administration's load in the media.

We know, for instance, that Al Qaeda was an enemy of Saddam, that one of Al Qaeda's principal aims is the collapse of the despotic and secular regimes of the Middle East. We know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know that even if there were, Iraq did not possess any substantial delivery system. We know that there was no intelligence whatsoever, no public pronouncements, no realistic ability and/or threat from Iraq on the United States or any of our allies, including Iraq's regional neighbor Israel.

The majority of the American people now acknowledge that we were duped. Thousands of lives later -- American and Iraqi -- we know we were duped into thinking that Iraq was tied to 9/11. Iraq is now on the brink of civil war. We are witnessing some of the worst sectarian violence since the Bosnian conflagration. In the end, we could see Iraq splinter into three spheres of influence: Kurdish control in the north, Iranian domination in the south, and the historical center of the Babylonian civilization in central Iraq left destroyed, anarchical, impotent and the new world capital of terrorism.

And for what? At what cost in human lives and dollars? At what cost to American stature abroad? At what cost to the American economy and the stability of Iraq?

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann may have said it best: "How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love (after 9/11), and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion ... How dare you -- or those around you -- ever 'spin' 9/11?"

This war was predicated on a lie and for much of the past five years most Americans, including Chaldean Americans, bought into this lie. But the lie has been exposed.

Five years later, the war is a disaster. Five years later, the facts demonstrate that the hysteria over Iraq was a deliberate hoax played on the American people by the Bush administration. It was bought into by a weak Congress and propagated by a sycophantic media.

MIKE SARAFA is president of Chaldean Iraqi Association of Michigan and twice voted for President George W. Bush. Write to him in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St. Detroit 48226 or oped@freepress.com.

Blue1moon

obmar

http://www.netscape.com/viewstory...sh_war_timeline%2F&frame=true

Lie by Lie: Chronicle of a War Foretold: August 1990 to March 2003
The first drafts of history are fragmentary. Important revelations arrive late, and out of order. In this timeline, we’ve assembled the history of the Iraq War to create a resource we hope will help resolve open questions of the Bush era. What did our leaders know and when did they know it? And, perhaps just as important, what red flags did we miss, and how could we have missed them? This is the first installment in our Iraq War timeline project.

Blue1moon

Excellent find, Obmar!

obmar

Some days we could be luckier than others...

Very Happy

The Inquisitor

Actually, obmar,

I'm now reading a book entitled, "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the events in the Middle East from 1979 to September 10, 2001. I've just started, but it is very intriguing and I already have several events that I hadn't heard about before.

example,

The US embassy in Islamabad was attacked by rioting Pakistanis in 1979 even before the embassy in Tehran, Iran, was overtaken.

The CIA met with Massoud in 1996 when he was still Defense Minister of the fledgling government in Afghanistan, trying to buy back the 2,000 stinger missiles they had given the mujahideen to battle the Soviets. But by then, the Taliban were too strong and took over control of Kabul weeks later.

This looks like a very interesting book, and I hope to learn a lot more about the period between 1979 and 2001.

Blue1moon

The Inquisitor

It's about 1,000 pages long, Blue.

You're right, however, it is very interesting. He goes into a lot of detail about the Middle East and all the players' roles therein.