Tangled Up In Web Of Lies

Oh, What a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive

That the Bush Gang should find itself entangled in a web of deceit should come as no surprise to anyone who has ignored the regime’s smoke and mirrors act to justify going to war against Iraq and has paid attention to hard evidence. In Bushland, just as in war, the first casualty has always been the truth.

Consider the following:

Bush & Co. now justifies the war on the grounds that America has liberated millions of grateful Iraqis from the hands of a cruel tyrant. They seem to have conveniently forgotten that liberation of an oppressed people was the last of a series of excuses the Bush regime used to justify invading a sovereign nation that represented no immediate threat to our country.

Here are the original claims made by the Bush propaganda machine:

1. Sadddam Hussein supported Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and had a direct hand in the 9/11 attacks. Fact: The CIA determined early on that no connection between Saddam and bin Laden existed. Indeed, bin Laden called for the overthrow of the Hussein regime for being too secularist. Unhappy with the CIA's accurate assessment, War Minister Donald Rumsfeld created his own intelligence agency in the Defense Department to make such a claim.

2. Iraq was close to completing development of nuclear weapons and the means to use them to attack America and our allies. Fact: Iraq had no nuclear weapons program, which the Bush regime knew conclusively before making this erroneous claim. In other words, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, et.al. flat out lied to the American people and the rest of the world.

3. Iraq possessed massive arsenals of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam was prepared to unleash upon America and Israel. Fact: Three months after conquering Iraq, the U.S. military still cannot find any evidence of such arsenals; just as the U.N. inspectors could not find them before our tanks rushed pall mall to Baghdad.

4. When all other rationale were proven false, Bush, almost as an afterthought, trotted out the "liberation of an oppressed people" excuse. FACT: While it is certainly true that Saddam was, indeed, a cruel and murderous tyrant, he was no more cruel and murderous than our friends in the region -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, and our new friend, the formerly designated terrorist state of Pakistan, for example; Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran; and America's many other friends and allies over the years -- Iran under the CIA-installed Shah, Nicaragua under Somoza, Chile under the Pinochet regime, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, Haiti under "Papa Doc" Duvallier, Cuba under the rule of Batista, etc., etc., etc. Under all of these dictatorships, thousands of innocent civilians "disappeared" or were murdered in plain sight.

Successive administrations turned a blind eye to all these atrocities. Indeed, the Reagan administration, with Rumsfeld as its point man, provided Saddam with the weaponry and chemical weapons he used on Iran, as well as on Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite populations to quell uprisings. As caustic comedian Bill Maher quipped, “We know Saddam has biological and chemical weapons because we have the receipts.” Saddam was our friend then. We even have video footage of a smiling Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand. Talk about shaking hands with the devil! The only question is, how many devils are we talking about?

Moreover, while Saddam was, indeed, a dictator, Iraq was one of the more progressive Islamic countries in the region. It provided full rights for women and public education for its citizens. Before we destroyed its infrastructure during the Gulf War and strangled its economy with sanctions afterward, its citizens enjoyed a decent standard of living.

Supporters of the war go on at great length about how grateful the Iraqi people are that they now live under the military occupation of a foreign power. "Their lives are, and will continue to be, much better for what we have done," wrote one man in a letter to the editor of my local newspaper. Doesn't this man watch television or read the newspaper?

Iraq is in chaos, its infrastructure in disarray, its cities without sufficient water, sewage treatment, or electrical power, its hospitals lacking the most fundamental equipment and medicine to treat injury and disease, its citizens terrorized by looters and bandits.

The Iraqi people are so grateful to the United States that every single day American servicemen are killed or wounded. Since "Top Gun" Bush declared the battle phase of the war a success, almost 30 Americans have died in Iraq. That brings the death toll of Americans killed in the war to over 220 lives. And the number of Americans coming home in body bags will continue to rise.

Link from BuzzFlash