Patriot Analysis – 3/20/04
“Get Iraq!”
By Kirt R. Poovey
The truth just cannot be buried forever. It will come out – and when it does will you be a believer or a denier?
I sometimes make the mistake of thinking that everyone knows everything that I know, and that they understand everything the way that I do. Unfortunately, I many times must explain information in a way that others have not heard before so that they can better understand. Or I find that people are not privy to the same info that I have.
Sometimes it seems that I repeat myself on the same issues and I refrain from once again covering those issues. But then I talk to people, or read what they have to say in magazines, email, or elsewhere and I realize that they still don’t get it.
Why is it that conservatives just don’t get it that Bush and company wanted a reason (any reason) to go to war with Iraq? They believe that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was trying to get back at Bush for firing him when O’Neill said, "From the very beginning, there was a conviction (by the Bush administration) that Saddam Hussein …needed to go.” They were looking for an excuse.
Just when the Bush camp thought things were settling down and they were reassuring conservatives that Bush was doing a great job with the War on Terror and that the administration hadn’t been looking for justification to take out Saddam, along comes Bush’s former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, saying exactly what O’Neill said.
Worse, he is quoted as saying Bush is doing “a terrible job on the war against terrorism.” This just after Bush bragged about his great performance as to why he should be reelected. This revelation comes at a bad time for the Bush camp, but is great timing for the Kerry crew.
Clarke claims that he wrote to Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Adviser, on January 24, 2001, to arrange a Cabinet-level meeting to “urgently…deal with the impending al-Qaeda attack.”
We have been led to believe that there was nothing in the pipeline that indicated anything of an urgent nature regarding terrorism until 9/11, but here is the former counterterrorism head himself saying that nearly eight months prior to Black Tuesday he wanted to “urgently” discuss the “impending…attack”!
Yet in April when Clarke met with deputy cabinet secretaries, the conversation was of Iraq. Clarke says of Bush and terrorism, “He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something.”
After 9/11 Bush was looking for a link to blame Iraq and Saddam. “Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said, ‘Iraq did this,’” Clarke said. However, Clarke explained to the President that U.S. intelligence agencies had never found any connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. (This, of course, is contrary to what the official line is from the administration puppets giving sound bites to the media.)
Bush shot back at him, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection!” This account of the conversation is backed up by at least one other eyewitness.
Not pulling any punches, Clarke also lambasted Bush for his invasion of Iraq. “Bin Laden had been saying for years, ‘America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country.’ This is part of his propaganda. So what did we do after 9/11? We invade…and occupy an oil-rich Arab country, which was doing nothing to threaten us.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself (and I have been saying it for quite some time). Wake up, America! Bush and his cronies are not operating in the nation’s best interest militarily, financially, spiritually, morally, or any other way. Meanwhile, our soldiers continue to die.
"We will stand, fight, and die to defend our country; but we will not blindly trust it. Even our Founding Fathers distrusted a large, centralized, all-powerful federal government -- so should we. Always be on guard to discern the truth and defend it at all costs."