Commentators Roundup: Bush and the Iraq War

LATEST : 23.05 PM A suicide bomber detonated 1,000 pounds of explosives in a pickup truck outside the headquarters compound of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad Sunday, killing at least 18 bystanders, including two U.S. Defense Department workers . Read Here for more

NEWS UPDATE (04.45 pm)

The U.S. death toll in the Iraq conflict has now reached 500 . This death toll was reached when a powerful bomb exploded under a U.S. armored vehicle in the cane fields north of Baghdad on Saturday, and killed three American soldiers.

Most of the deaths have occurred AFTER President Bush declared an end to major fighting on May 1. The death toll from the First Gulf War to remove Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in 1991, was only 315.

How many more brave young American boys and girls have to die in Iraq for President Bush and his neo-con advisers and supporters to realize the occupation of Iraq is unsustainable and untenable?

And where are Saddam's weapons of mass destruction - the very reason made at last year's State of the Union Address by the President for the invasion of Iraq ?

Charlie Reese
I don't know about you, but I'm damned angry that the president took this country to war on false pretenses. He has now dreamed up all these other reasons for going to war, but he sold this war to Congress and to the American people on the basis that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Now we have nearly 500 dead Americans who died to protect the United States from weapons that don't exist. And more will die, and for what reason? One thing you can be sure of: They won't die defending the United States, because Iraq is not now and never was a threat to the United States

This president... is, behind his facade of good old boy, apparently a man so arrogant that he does not think the American people deserve to be told the truth. If the American people are not offended enough to throw him out of office, then apparently - in this country, anyway - the truth no longer matters. Read HERE for FULL Article (Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001.)

Paul Craig Roberts
Fear must be coursing through President Bush's veins as he realizes the Iraqi trap in which the neocons have placed him. Bush is caught between an Iraqi civil war and a wider insurgency. How did a handful of neocon ideologues hijack US foreign policy?

Bush did not campaign on a neocon policy of conquest in the Middle East. There was no public debate over this policy. The invasion of Iraq was the private agenda of the neocons. Why have the neocons not been held responsible for their treason in abusing their presidential appointments to substitute their personal agenda for America's agenda? Bush has been the neocon's puppet for so long that he is now stuck with responsibility for their horrible mistake. Read Here for FULL Article


Justin Raimondo
The U.S., which went to war to export "democracy" to Iraq (and the entire Middle East), in defiance of the UN, is telling the Iraqis that they aren't ready for self-government, and is now seeking the UN Secretary General's imprimatur for what amounts to a policy of brazen imperialism. Instead of elections, a series of elite "caucus" meetings will be held, in which the neocons handpick the voters ? and predetermine the results. Some "liberation"!

The Americans refused to cooperate with a plan by the Iraqis to take a census: Nuha Yousef, the Iraqi census director, guaranteed a count by December. But, as the New York Times reported, the occupation authorities nixed the plan.

What is happening today in Iraq is proof positive of Joshua Marshall's fascinating thesis, that the whole idea behind the neocons' postwar plan for Iraq is that there wasn't one. Read Here for FULL Article

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Memo to the President- Your State of the Union Address :We write this, our fifth such memorandum to you since our critique of Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN speech last February, out of concern that the same advisers who served you so poorly in drafting the Iraq section of last year's state-of-the-union address will embarrass you again. Your credibility and that of the intelligence community suffered a major blow from the hyperbole that characterized that speech. .... Finally, you may wish to read the advice we provided prior to last year's state-of-the-union address. We append our letter of last January, in the hope it will encourage you to take this year's recommendations seriously. Read Here Full Article

JASON LEOPOLD
Anyone who doubts former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's recent claims that President Bush mislead the public and secretly planned the Iraq war eight months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 needs to read the two letters sent to then President Bill Clinton in 1998 and Speaker of the House Trent Lott by current members of the Bush administration urging Clinton to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq.

"Only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq..." PNAC founder Kristol wrote in a 1997 report. A year after Kristol's report, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Armitage and other PNAC members sent a letter to Clinton, repeating much of what Kristol said in his report a year earlier.

"We urge you to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power," says the letter sent to Clinton. "This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts."
Read Here FUll Article

Robert Reich
Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill claimed, in interviews and in a new book, that President George W. Bush intended to depose Saddam Hussein from the start - seven months before 9/11. If O'Neill is correct, America has lost many lives and paid a huge price to get rid of a terrible dictator who posed no direct danger to this nation. The world is better off without him, but at what price? We were directly and intentionally misled. If O'Neill is telling the truth - and we have no reason to doubt his veracity - there's serious doubt about the loyalty of this administration to America. Read Here FULL Article

Eric Margolis
An almighty United States, unrestrained by any rival, international body, or world opinion, bestrode the globe, a belligerent colossus determined to monopolize global oil reserves and use its vast military power to crush lesser nations or malefactors that disturbed the Pax Americana. President George Bush, who vowed his foreign policy would be "humble" and "compassionate," has turned out to be the most radical president in modern U.S. history.

Bush's vow to bring "democracy" to the Mideast rang as hollow as pious assurances by 19th century European colonialists they were gobbling up Africa and Asia to bring the blessings of Christianity and civilization to benighted savages. Pillaging resources, not enlightenment, were - and remain - the true colonial motivation.

Bush's claims to hold the mandate of heaven to wage global warfare against the nebulous forces of "terrorism" sounded as dangerous and nonsensical as old Chairman Leonid Brezhnev's drunken claims it was the Soviet Union's "sacred internationalist duty" to launch military adventures anywhere on Earth where socialism was threatened. Read Here for FULL Article

David Corn
When will George W. Bush say, "We were wrong on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"? The evidence--or lack of evidence--continues to mount suggesting that Bush and his aides made false statements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war. Remember all that alarmist rhetoric?

In an October 2002 speech, Bush said Iraq had a "massive stockpile" of weapons of mass destruction. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction...that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In his famous presentation to the United Nations Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq, today, has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent." Read Here for FULL Article

Ted Rall
The Bush Administration, reported The New York Times on January 8, "has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment. The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March." 1,400 members of the Iraq Survey Group have been searching for WMDs during the last seven months. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars. They've been to every government installation in the country. They've come up empty-handed.

Calling off the WMD hunt is Bush's tacit admission that he lied about the reasons for war. It's hard to think of anything worse that a president can do. It's even harder to imagine the American people, so cynically accepting of deception, holding him accountable. Read for FULL Article

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