"Norman Podhoretz, the grand daddy of the Straussian neocons, expends a few thousand words in an attempt to convince us George Bush didn’t lie when he told us Saddam had a WMD program and was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden. “Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed,” writes Podhoretz in the December issue of Commentary (posted in advance on the Commentary website).
“To lie means to say something one knows to be false,” Podhoretz asserts. “But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.”
I agree with Podhoretz. But before you think I have gone over to the Neocon Dark Side, allow me to explain. Indeed, it is possible, more than likely, Bush did not tell a series of lies. His neocon advisers did. Bush is a cardboard cut-out placed in office by the neocons. He is a cigar store Indian. He simply repeated the lies served up by the neocons and the Office of Special Plans. Due to his disinterest, his lack of curiosity, his distaste for reading, and absence of critical intelligence, Bush does little more than fumble through the provided script. Bush “believed in the truth of what he was saying” because he lives in a dualistic, Manichean world of radical absolutes, and thus is incapable of critical assessment. Moreover, he had long ago decided to attack Iraq and left it up to more intelligent neocons to provide a bogus basis for the attack.
Podhoretz does not mention the Office of Special Plans, Karl Rove and Andrew Card’s White House Iraq Group, the Downing Street Memo, the yellowcake uranium forgeries, or any number of other instances of documented deception crafted by his neocon brethren. Instead, Podhoretz blames British intelligence, the CIA, Joseph Wilson, the Robb-Silberman commission, the Clinton administration, and a host of others, including just about every Democrat in Congress (including Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and others). In fact, for Podhoretz, the blame for the obvious and glaring lies about the illusory Iraqi WMD program can be attributed to the Clinton administration, in particular Secretary of State Madeline Albright, Clinton’s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and Secretary of Defense, William Cohen.
Indeed, Clinton and the Democrats are to blame, as there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to invading countries and slaughtering thousands of innocent people (in fact, it can be argued Clinton has a more gruesome record than Bush—he oversaw the sanctions on Iraq for eight years, brutal and inhumane sanctions responsible for killing around 1.5 million Iraqis, 500,000 of them innocent children). However, Podhoretz’s insistence the Clinton administration is responsible for Bush’s decision (actually the decision of the neocons) to invade Iraq is ludicrous, to say the least. As we know, the neocons (via PNAC) sent a letter to Clinton urging him to invade, but Clinton ignored the letter, likely understanding it came from the “crazies” previously chalked off as the sort of people who should be avoided. Moreover, the neocons and Republicans have made a cottage industry out of bashing and blaming Clinton, so we may consider Podhoretz’s assertion more of the same.
As we know, the neocons planned to invade Iraq (followed by Syria and Iran) for some time, beginning with Wolfowitz’s 1992 “Defense Planning Guidance” draft (at the time, Wolfowitz and the neocons in the first Bush administration were dismissed as “crazies” and the draft was rejected out of hand as lunatic ravings). As Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald revealed, a “secret blueprint for US global domination reveal[ed] that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ‘regime change’ even before he took power in January 2001…. The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’ was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W Bush’s younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).” Additional candidates for “regime change” included China—nothing less than complete lunacy, considering the United States military cannot defeat a few thousand determined Iraqi resistance fighters (imagine going up against 1,306,313,812 Chinese—but then, I suppose, that’s what nukes are for).
“And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq—the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy—have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation, and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American ideals,” Podhoretz concludes.
Sounds like a plan to me—so long as the sweep does not stop with the Democrats and continues into the White House, the Pentagon, and beyond Capitol Hill to the neocon foundations, the criminal organizations (RICO should be used against them), including Podhoretz’ Hudson Institute, ultimately responsible for planning and launching the criminal invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
“American ideals” are native to the Constitution and do not include invading Arab countries for the sake of Israel, as Philip Zelikow, executive director of the Bush whitewash commission, has admitted. In fact, as the retired editor Commentary, a monthly publication of the American Jewish Committee, Podhoretz should be called on his allegiance (either he follows the Constitution or he spends his twilight years in Israel, sucking up to his master, the fascist Jabotinsky Likudites).
Finally, Podhoretz’s long-winded essay will mean little, as the ball is now rolling and more and more people realize “Bush lied,” that is to say he more or less mindlessly mouthed the engineered lies of the neocons, the vast majority of them Muslim-hating and Islamophobic Likudite fascists. Of course, this realization will not result in the impeachment of Bush and the prosecution of the neocon war criminals. It is far too late for that now—the Bushites have stacked the deck: Congress is packed with loyal Republicans (mostly Christian Zionists and their fellow travelers), the judicial branch, including the Supreme Court, is stacked with reactionary appointees, and the executive has taken on powers heretofore unrealized, and the Constitution is attacked consistently (the Bill of Rights is basically a dead letter, as any honest civil libertarian will tell you).
In short, the Bushites have won. It will take a Second American Revolution to repair the damage the cardboard cut-out Bush, the rapture-crazed Christian Zionists, and the Zionist neocons have inflicted on this country.
I don’t know if the American people are up to the task."
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