Radical Avenue

Apparently President Bush isn’t the only politician wondering about his legacy these days. With Mr. Bush’s approval ratings now below freezing, and no indication that Americans will ever warm up to W again, former presidential spokesman Scott McClellan became the first of the longtime Texas insiders to jump ship.

In his new book, What Happened, Mr. McClellan makes it clear that he now considers the War in Iraq a serious strategic blunder:

“As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the upheavals of war provide the opportunity for the transformative change that he hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness.

I do not know how the war will be viewed decades from now. What I do know is that war should be waged only when necessary and the Iraq war was not necessary. Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake. But I’ve come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made - a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.

In the autumn of 2002 Bush and his White House engaged in a carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval to our advantage.”

Iraqi Nuclear Threat Vastly Overstated
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 killed around 70,000 people, many of them instantaneously. A second nuclear device which the US detonated over Nagasaki, Japan shortly thereafter resulted in similar casualty figures. These events brought an end to World War II and changed the planet forever.

No chemical or biological weapon has ever approached the destructive capacity of an atomic bomb. By lumping nuclear weapons in with chemical and biological weapons, American politicians have purposely misled the public for partisan political reasons.

WMD Propaganda
The phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction” is a product of the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine. Scott McClellan described it like this: “the administration chose a different path - not employing out-and-out deception but shading the truth; downplaying the reason for going to war; trying to make the weapons of mass destruction threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain than they were; quietly disregarding some of the crucial caveats in the intelligence and minimizing evidence that pointed in the opposite direction.”

“They also encouraged Americans to believe as fact some things that were unclear and possibly false (for example, that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program) and other things that were overplayed or wrong (for example, that Saddam might have had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda).”

Iraq had no atomic bomb and no capacity to build one when the United States invaded in 2003. George W. Bush promised to restore honesty and integrity to the office when he became president seven years ago. Instead he led the country into war based on false pretenses. The United States can’t afford such recklessness from its commander in chief.

Scott McClellan, WMD