Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Children's saying
It just depends on whom you believe. And if Mr. Bush tells us that Saddam
Hussein is inextricably linked to al-Qaeda, we should believe him, since he's
our president. And if he tells us that we can easily win any war with Iraq, we
should believe him since he's our president. And if the Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Post and the Guardian weekly contradict him, we should loudly complain
that the liberal media are out to get him.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 23, U.S. intelligence
officials contradict Mr. Bush by saying that they have not found hard evidence
of an active link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to them, Iraq abandoned
its support for anti-U.S. terrorism in the early 1990s. The report says that Mr.
Hussein "appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks."
On a slightly alarming note, however, it goes on to say that: "Should Saddam conclude
that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much
less constrained [sic] in adopting terrorist actions."
A report in the Washington Post on Oct. 27, gave a number of examples of presidential
deceptions, including some pertaining to Iraq. On Sept. 7, at a meeting Mr. Bush
had with Tony Blair at Camp David, Mr. Bush told reporters that the International
Atomic Energy Agency had issued a report in which it said that Iraq was six months
away from developing a weapon and went on to say that: "I don't know what more
evidence we need." The answer would have been, had he really wanted to know, current
evidence. A 1998 report from the IAEA had indeed said that Iraq had been six to
24 months away from nuclear capability before the 1991 Gulf War, but that was
11 years before Mr. Bush gave his speech. The 1991 war destroyed that capability.
The agency's 1998 report said there was "no indication of Iraq having achieved
its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical
capability for the production of weapon-usable material or having clandestinely
obtained such material." When confronted with Mr. Bush's mendacity the White House
said he had been imprecise and was relying on U.S. intelligence and not the IAEA
report.
In that same article, the author observed that in a speech in Cincinnati on
Oct. 7, Mr. Bush said that in 1998 a high ranking defector disclosed that Mr.
Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue. The defector, Khidhir Hamza,
spoke publicly in 1998 but according to the Post, left Iraq's nuclear program
in 1991, fled to the north in 1994 and left the country in 1995. We should complain
about the Washington Post since even if Mr. Bush has, as it and other papers suggest,
lied, we all know that Mr. Hussein is a bad man and we know we can defeat him
if we invade his country unless, of course, you read the Guardian Weekly of Sept.
26, which interviewed Lt. General Paul Van Riper.
General Van Riper was the man in charge of enemy forces in Millennium Challenge.
It was described as the biggest war game of all time and involved integrated operations
by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The exercises were part real and part
virtual reality generated by sophisticated computer models.
The game was theoretically set in 2007 and pitted Blue forces, the U.S., against
a country called Red, a militarily powerful Middle Eastern nation on the Persian
Gulf that was home to a crazed but cunning megalomaniac, played by General Van
Riper. The report suggests that when the games were planned in 2000 Iran was probably
the make-believe enemy, but by the time play commenced, Iraq had become the target.
Describing the war games, General Van Riper said: "The game was described as free
play. In other words, there were two sides trying to win."
When the games began, General Van Riper concluded that Blue would try to launch
a surprise strike (as Mr. Bush has said he would do) so "I decided I would attack
first." The result was that the general sank 16 U.S. ships killing thousands of
Marines. He got rid of the fleet's only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter
carriers. If this had been actual combat it would have been the worst naval disaster
since Pearl Harbor.
The U.S. generals and admirals who were monitoring the games were distressed
at General Van Riper's success and called "time out." The report said that following
the sinking of the U.S. fleet: "[T]he Pentagon top brass simply pretended the
whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and
'refloated' the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the
other way as their marines performed amphibious landings." They instructed General
Van Riper to turn off his air defenses at times when and places where Blue wanted
to stage an attack and to move his forces away from beaches where the marines
were scheduled to land. "The whole thing was being scripted," General Van Riper
said. Nonetheless, he continued playing until he discovered that his orders to
his subordinates were being countermanded by the folks in charge of running the
games in order to improve the results of the games. The good thing is, these were
only games.
Victory will be Mr. Bush's when war is substituted for play. That is what Mr.
Bush tells us and if he says it, it must be so — unless he is lying and the
liberal press got it right after all.
Christopher Brauchli is a Boulder lawyer and and writes a weekly column
for the Knight Ridder news service. He can be reached at brauchli1@attbi.com
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