George Bush’s Web of Lies

Everyone who opens the mouth makes mistakes, and we pardon them

The USA is ready to use force to make Iraq liquidate its weapons of mass destruction, US President George W. Bush says. The USA prefers a peaceful settlement of the Iraqi conflict, however, it is ready to start a battle to succeed with the objective, the president said when he addressed troops at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. “You'll be fighting not to conquer anybody but to liberate people,” the US president said. In his words, different circumstances demand different strategies, from diplomatic pressure to usage of force. The very fact that UNMOVIC inspectors still fail to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is just an additional argument proving Saddam’s guilt.

Being entangled in his own lies, the US president doesn’t distinguish any more between the reality and the illusion. Obliging brains prompt appropriate words. The other day, George W. Bush said that the USA realized perfectly well the dangers and the challenges the country faced; he added that the present-day generation of Americans was ready to carry the burden of the world’s super-power number one. “We act in the cause of peace and freedom and in that cause we will prevail."

Last month, when George Bush told the nation about the necessity to call Saddam Hussein into account, he also warned that Iraq’s fleet of unmanned planes was increasing, and the planes could be used for “missions targeted at the USA.” At that very period, President Bush was asked about new evidences proving Saddam’s development of weapons of mass destruction; George W. Bush cited a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency saying that “Iraq was six months away from making the weapon.” Those statements were strong arguments for the actions planned by President Bush; however, they were all dubious, we can also say erroneous. As it turned out later, the above mentioned planes had insufficient range to hit the USA; no report of this kind was published by the IAEA. As George W. Bush leads the nation to confrontation with Iraq and his party to the struggle at the pre-elections, his rhetoric is getting somewhat fantastic. The statements announced by the US president on different subjects, from economic to the Iraqi problem, reveal that the president who won the elections by convicting Al Gore of falsification and exaggeration, is himself guilty of some. Exaggerations made by presidents are no doubt a tradition hoary with ages. Ronald Reagan was famous for his apocryphal story about a concentration camp liberation. Bill Clinton even under oath lied about his private thoughtless deeds in order to be always a step ahead of accusers. Richard Nixon had his refutations concerning Watergate; Lyndon Johnson was often blamed for manipulation of the truth for the sake of saving his face because of the Vietnam War. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy also manipulated with the truth in the situations with Harry Powers and the Bay of Pigs.

Stephen Hess from the Brookings Institution says: “Everyone who opens the mouth, makes mistakes, and we pardon them.” He adds that some of the exaggerations pronounced by George W. Bush are just accidental mistakes, but what is more alarming, some of them seem to be well considered. The president has an obligation to speak correctly about politics, prospective wars and about enemies of the country.

Bush’s high politics is saturated with lies; many facts are far-fetched so convincingly that people even start believing these facts. Let’s get back to Iraq. At a meeting with British Prime Minister Anthony Blair in Camp David on September 7 George W. Bush told journalists: “I want to mention that when UNMOVIC inspectors got to Iraq for the first time, they were finally denied access; at that, the IAEA reported that Iraq was six months away from developing weapons of mass destruction. I don’t know what other evidence we need.”

The IAEA actually issued a report in 1998, approximately at the time when the inspectors were not allowed to Iraq last time, but the report contained no resolutions of this kind. It said: “Based on reliable information, the IAEA discovered no evidence of Iraq’s success in development of nuclear weapons, no evidence of Iraq’s capabilities for weapons development or evidence proving that Iraq illegally obtained nuclear materials for weapons development.” It was also reported that Iraq had been 24 months away from developing weapons of mass destruction before the 1991 Gulf War. The White House declared that George W. Bush was “not correct” with the statement, as it was not the IAEA, but the US Intelligence that was the source of the information. It might be called a trivial detail, but the US’s large-scale politics is based upon such details.

Another considered lie invented by the US president is a missile shield. In December 2002, President Bush declared that the USA would create the first effective system of anti-missile defense in 2004 already. This is the most important promise concerning national security that had been made during the pre-election campaign. The president of America decided to keep the promise because of threats from such countries as North Korea, and also because of the increasing danger of an alliance to be made up by those terrorist groups and countries that have weapons capable to reach the USA. Until recently, eight tests of an anti-missile defense system were held. During the tests, a missile launched in California was to intercept and liquidate a missile launched by the enemy from an island in the Pacific Ocean. Three of the tests failed, but the White House declared that data obtained during the test were encouraging for realization of a project at the cost of not less than 60 billion dollars. The company Raytheon got the order for creation of a nuclear shield, and Lincoln Laboratory, a structure of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology financed from the federal funds, worked on scientific substantiation of the project and supported it. However, Professor Postol from the same institution sticks to a different opinion. In his words, results of the tests were forged in order to create an impression that the system performed much better than it actually did in fact. The scholar said that together with a group of scientists he had sent a letter to the Congress to say that interceptor missiles couldn’t distinguish real missiles from abstractive ones. If the scientists are right, enemies can easily deliver a blow against the USA with the help of real carriers with abstractive missiles, and this is not a fantasy. The order for making sensor systems responsible for defining targets was given to the company Twr. Despite the fact that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed effectiveness of the systems, Twr staffer Nira Schwarz blamed the leadership of the company of data manipulation. La Stampa reports, the US Congress’s General Accounting Office confirmed the credibility of claims laid by Schwarz.

Dmitry Litvinovich PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva

Read the original in Russian: https://www.pravda.ru/world/34147-bush/