Columnist
“The only way to protect this country is to deal with threats before they fully materialize.”
Ponder this cold-blooded declaration President George W. Bush made last week in defense of his Iraq war policy, which has been judged counterproductive by all 16 top U.S. intelligence agencies.
Bush blasted the best spy minds in the world as “naïve” for differing with his rosy Iraq assessment. In so doing, the president gave Americans a public glimpse of his mindset, so resistant to rigorous analysis and facts. Indeed, this very Bush mule-headedness in March 2003 ignored all intelligence that did not link al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein and arm the Iraqi leader with weapons of mass destruction.
The president’s bellicosity at last week’s White House press conference, with his secretary of state sitting resplendent in her neat suit in the front row, appeared to make even her clenched jaw drop. Standing at a nearby lectern like a guest caught up in a fierce family squabble, Afghan President Hamid Karzai humbly removed his stylish karakul hat made of the fur of aborted lamb fetuses. It was difficult to tell which leader represented a tribal nation struggling to pull itself out of fiefdom and which headed the world’s lone superpower.
Bush’s rampage was sparked by the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism first printed in the New York Times. “The American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism,” the paper reported, and “the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.”
This assessment surprises no one, except perhaps Laura Bush and the cult followers of the Revs. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. It certainly is not news to the U.S. troops doing the fighting or the jihadists streaming across the Iraq border to answer the call to arms.
Under heavy conservative pressure, Bush responded by declassifying four pages of the 30-page report. Even this carefully selected portion confirmed the worst fears: The Iraq war allows more anti-American jihadists to be trained and battle-hardened.
Thus, Bush has needlessly increased the terror danger to the United States by going after Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
While it was bad manners for Bush to dress down the entire U.S. intelligence corps as “naïve” in front of the Afghan president, the contempt he showed for the American people was worse still. By attacking the press for publishing what the world already knows, Bush seeks to keep voters in the dark about what he’s doing with their tax dollars and with American lives.
At this momentous period of our history, the republic is stuck with a former Yale cheerleader and a military service shirker as the “war president.” Bush even fancies his wisdom will surpass the collected intelligence of the world’s most technologically advanced spy agency.
Reckless, pre-emptive war is not preached by great leaders or practiced by a great nation. Bush and Cheney may be too entangled in the barbwire of Iraq to withdraw. The Founding Fathers, however, provided a mechanism for the republic to separate such leaders from high office. We probably don’t have two years, for the blood is flowing.