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- Jan 26, 2003
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- 22,146
It's Too Late Now to complain that George W. Bush fooled the gullible American public into invading Iraq. At the time he wanted to do it, I kept saying, "Why Iraq? On September 11 terrorists born in Saudi Arabia and trained in Afghanistan bombed The Twin Towers and The Pentagon. Why should we invade Iraq?"
But no one listened. I felt like someone in a dream trying to speak-then shout-that invading Iraq was bizarre. It made no sense. I felt incredible frustration as I argued in vain to masses of people who seemed unable to tell Iraq from the countries who had sent the terrorists to bomb us!
Then recently when Iraq and Syria became the playground for ISIS and the refugees began to pour out of Syria, drowning at sea and straggling onto the Greek shores, I couldn't believe what George W. Bush had wrought with his arrogance and hubris. And now Tony Blair has been skewered even more in the British press as his role behind the scenes has come out. He was completely duplicitous to the British public when he sold them on going to war in Iraq. All along he meant to lead Britain into the war as he had secretly promised President Bush.
Maureen Dowd has reawakened my old anger, as did the infamous 28 page "Graham report" to which she refers (which has been in the news) with a column I have excerpted below. What "W" pulled on us (and Blair on the UK) is infamous.
"A new biography, "Bush," by Jean Edward Smith, makes the same points that Trump made when he shook up the Republican orthodoxy and tripped up Jeb — that W. ignored warnings before 9/11 and overreacted after.
'To argue that by taking the actions that he did, the president kept America safe is meretricious,' Smith writes, adding: 'The fact is, the threat of terrorism that confronts the United States is in many respects a direct result of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.'
Speaking of meretricious, we finally got to see two long-awaited government documents last week.
The sterling former Senator Bob Graham of Florida pushed the Bush and Obama administrations to declassify the notorious 28 pages held back when the 9/11 congressional inquiry was released in December 2002.
The section details suspicious ties between the hijackers — 15 out of 19 were Saudis — and other Qaeda operatives to the Saudi royal family. In one instance, the first Qaeda prisoner in C.I.A. custody post-9/11 had a phone number that belonged to a company that took care of Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s Colorado home. The former Saudi ambassador was so close to the Bushes he was known as Bandar Bush.
If the 28 pages had been released back in 2002, the revelations might have helped stop the Iraq invasion by refocusing attention where it belonged: on possible real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi royals, rather than the fantasy links between Al Qaeda and Saddam pushed by Dick Cheney.
W. said releasing the pages back then would 'make it harder for us to win the war on terror.' But now that we can see them, it’s clear that the reverse is true: It was the Saudis who repeatedly stymied American efforts to crack down on Al Qaeda in the years before 9/11.
The British government’s Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war also finally landed — a 2.6 million-word report savaging Tony Blair.
In 2002, Blair affirmed his lap-dog bona fidos by sending W. a note saying 'I will be with you, whatever.'
The British public deemed Blair a pariah long ago. But it took the British government seven years to conclude that Blair enabled W. to start a war on dodgy intelligence with inadequate planning to control the killing fields of a post-Saddam landscape, a landscape that eventually spawned ISIS.
Sarah Helm, the wife of Jonathan Powell, a top Blair aide in the ramp-up to war, wrote a piece in The Guardian recently about a conversation between W. and Blair. She said she listened with Mr. Powell on a crackly secure phone at their house one night in March 2003. A journalist, Helm took notes that she would later use in a play.
This is her account: Blair was still trying vainly to steer the president, who was cocky and impervious. W. told Blair he was 'ready to kick ass.' He dismissed Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector who could not find any W.M.D. in Iraq, as 'that no-count.' He praised Blair’s body language in pushing for war and urged the poodle prime minister to 'hang on in there' and show 'cojones.'
When Blair raised the objections of the French, W. mocked: 'Yeah, but what did the French ever do for anyone? What wars did they win since the French Revolution?'
W. comes across as a naïve, willful, spangly cartoon cowboy. Sometimes, when at last you get a peek behind the curtain, your worst fears come true."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/w-borne-back-ceaselessly.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
AGBF
But no one listened. I felt like someone in a dream trying to speak-then shout-that invading Iraq was bizarre. It made no sense. I felt incredible frustration as I argued in vain to masses of people who seemed unable to tell Iraq from the countries who had sent the terrorists to bomb us!
Then recently when Iraq and Syria became the playground for ISIS and the refugees began to pour out of Syria, drowning at sea and straggling onto the Greek shores, I couldn't believe what George W. Bush had wrought with his arrogance and hubris. And now Tony Blair has been skewered even more in the British press as his role behind the scenes has come out. He was completely duplicitous to the British public when he sold them on going to war in Iraq. All along he meant to lead Britain into the war as he had secretly promised President Bush.
Maureen Dowd has reawakened my old anger, as did the infamous 28 page "Graham report" to which she refers (which has been in the news) with a column I have excerpted below. What "W" pulled on us (and Blair on the UK) is infamous.
"A new biography, "Bush," by Jean Edward Smith, makes the same points that Trump made when he shook up the Republican orthodoxy and tripped up Jeb — that W. ignored warnings before 9/11 and overreacted after.
'To argue that by taking the actions that he did, the president kept America safe is meretricious,' Smith writes, adding: 'The fact is, the threat of terrorism that confronts the United States is in many respects a direct result of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.'
Speaking of meretricious, we finally got to see two long-awaited government documents last week.
The sterling former Senator Bob Graham of Florida pushed the Bush and Obama administrations to declassify the notorious 28 pages held back when the 9/11 congressional inquiry was released in December 2002.
The section details suspicious ties between the hijackers — 15 out of 19 were Saudis — and other Qaeda operatives to the Saudi royal family. In one instance, the first Qaeda prisoner in C.I.A. custody post-9/11 had a phone number that belonged to a company that took care of Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s Colorado home. The former Saudi ambassador was so close to the Bushes he was known as Bandar Bush.
If the 28 pages had been released back in 2002, the revelations might have helped stop the Iraq invasion by refocusing attention where it belonged: on possible real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi royals, rather than the fantasy links between Al Qaeda and Saddam pushed by Dick Cheney.
W. said releasing the pages back then would 'make it harder for us to win the war on terror.' But now that we can see them, it’s clear that the reverse is true: It was the Saudis who repeatedly stymied American efforts to crack down on Al Qaeda in the years before 9/11.
The British government’s Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war also finally landed — a 2.6 million-word report savaging Tony Blair.
In 2002, Blair affirmed his lap-dog bona fidos by sending W. a note saying 'I will be with you, whatever.'
The British public deemed Blair a pariah long ago. But it took the British government seven years to conclude that Blair enabled W. to start a war on dodgy intelligence with inadequate planning to control the killing fields of a post-Saddam landscape, a landscape that eventually spawned ISIS.
Sarah Helm, the wife of Jonathan Powell, a top Blair aide in the ramp-up to war, wrote a piece in The Guardian recently about a conversation between W. and Blair. She said she listened with Mr. Powell on a crackly secure phone at their house one night in March 2003. A journalist, Helm took notes that she would later use in a play.
This is her account: Blair was still trying vainly to steer the president, who was cocky and impervious. W. told Blair he was 'ready to kick ass.' He dismissed Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector who could not find any W.M.D. in Iraq, as 'that no-count.' He praised Blair’s body language in pushing for war and urged the poodle prime minister to 'hang on in there' and show 'cojones.'
When Blair raised the objections of the French, W. mocked: 'Yeah, but what did the French ever do for anyone? What wars did they win since the French Revolution?'
W. comes across as a naïve, willful, spangly cartoon cowboy. Sometimes, when at last you get a peek behind the curtain, your worst fears come true."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/w-borne-back-ceaselessly.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region
AGBF