On the fundamental questions of war and peace, of calling on the bravest young American men and women to sacrifice their lives, this administration and this president no longer have a shred of credibility.
Consider the headlines of the past week. The new Iraqi president, Ibrahim al-Jafaari, has traveled to Iran to cement a security alliance with the fundamentalist Iranian mullahs, prime members of the president’s Axis of Evil. Ali Shamkhani, the Iranian Defense Minister, hailed the pact as “a new chapter in our relations with Iraq.”
Has the U.S. spent $200 billion and sacrificed nearly 2,000 lives and left thousands more maimed and wounded so that the mullahs of Iran who despise the U.S. could gain an ally in Iraq and create a “Shiite crescent” in the Persian Gulf? It is hard to imagine any outcome that could be more destabilizing in this critical region of the world.
Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who has done more to bring forth the truth about the war than anyone, reports that the administration sponsored an “off the books” covert effort to fix the elections in Iraq to deny the Shiite religious parties a governing majority.
The White House hailed the elections as a grand success, a free and unfettered expression of democracy. But, according to Hersh’s intelligence sources, fraud was widespread on all sides. And the White House cooked up an off-the-books operation designed to help the party of acting Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a U.S. ally and former CIA retainer.
It apparently worked. Allawi’s party did much better than expected. The pro-U.S. Kurds did better than expected. The Shiite religious parties were denied a majority. Despite this, al-Jafaari, the head of the Shiite Dawa party and a fundamentalist who spent a decade in exile in Iran, became head of the government.
Even if the White House spokesmen end up denying it all, who could believe them? This is the White House that dismissed as “ridiculous” reports that political guru Karl Rove was involved in an effort to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson by outing his wife, who was a CIA employee operating under cover.
Now it is clear that denial was a lie. Rove was up to his eyebrows in the effort to discredit Wilson. And the president’s promise to remove anyone involved is apparently inoperative. Instead of launching an investigation, Republicans who control the Congress have put party over country, launching a bizarre propaganda blitz to attack Wilson to distract from the White House lies.
This is a disgrace for President Bush and the Republican Congress, but it is a calamity for our country. We desperately need wise and credible leadership to guide us though this catastrophe.