In his Sunday column for the New York Times Frank Rich anticipated the fourth anniversary of Bush’s Folly by listing some of the caution signs available to all Americans in the weeks leading up to the war.

Rich’s point was that a reasonably curious newspaper reader had in hand by that time all the information needed to foretell exactly what disasters Bush was about to unleash on the world.

Among reasonably curious newspaper readers we can safely include most members of Congress. Certainly we can include John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Being intelligent and experienced, both had to know perfectly well that Bush was running a transparent con on the Congress and the country.

That they voted for war anyway was for carefully calculated political reasons that had nothing to do with national security and everything to do with their own political futures. Their votes, like the votes of so many of their colleagues, were the votes of cowards perfectly willing to trade countless deaths for their own continuance in office.

That their cowardice has already cost one of them the presidency and will probably do the same for the other should cause nobody to mourn. Our mourning should be saved for the hundreds of thousands that Kerry and Clinton helped to kill and maim.

The two knew exactly what they were doing when they voted to give a proven killer like Bush — look at his record as governor — a free hand in the Middle East. In their hearts, I feel sure, both senators opposed the war. And I would guess that most of the other Democrats who voted to turn Bush loose felt the same way.

They could not possibly have been fooled by such clumsy liars as Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. Senators, by and large, are not even a little bit stupid. They knew — as we all knew, if we wanted to know and cared to look.

Sitting in front of a computer screen in West Cornwall, Connecticut, not a classified cable in sight, even I knew. And I know I knew because, following Rich’s example, I went through the archives last night. I came up with the following collection of links and excerpts from the weeks before the war. No doubt Senator Clinton knew all this, and a great deal more besides. For all the good it did …

(March 31, 2003) It takes a lot to get me into bed with Pat Buchanan. Clinton did it with NAFTA, a despicable treaty that has worked out just the way its worst critics said it would. And now Bush minor has done it with those big, sloppy freedom kisses he keeps planting on his Israeli dominatrix, Ariel Sharon.

In a long piece for The American Conservative Buchanan tells how President Bush wound up as the bottom man in this unhealthy and unnatural relationship.

(March 31, 2003) An extraordinary number of otherwise sensible citizens apparently believe that Mr. Bush has invaded Iraq to bring freedom to that country—never mind that it wasn’t remotely “free” even before Saddam Hussein.

And never mind that Iraq will not be free after him, either. There are words to describe what the country is likely to be, but "free" is not among them. The words are instead “military protectorate,” and “occupied territory,” and “dependency,” and “colony.”

(March 25, 2003, from the Philadelphia Inquirer) “Knowledgeable defense and administration officials say Rumsfeld and his civilian aides at first wanted to commit no more than 60,000 American troops to the war on the assumption that the Iraqis would capitulate in two days.

“Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Saddam once the Americans attacked…”

(March 24, 2003, from the New York Times) “The recent disclosure that reports claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were based partly on forged documents has renewed complaints among analysts at the C.I.A. about the way intelligence related to Iraq has been handled, several intelligence officials said.

“Analysts at the agency said they had felt pressured to make their intelligence reports on Iraq conform to Bush administration policies.”

(March 20, 2003) In his war speech last night, President Bush used the term “weapons of mass murder” for what I believe was the first time …Last night’s change is unlikely to be just another slip of the president’s tongue. I suspect it means that the empire builders were feeling constrained by the old term, which limited them to invading only nations in possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The new term, however, justifies preventive war against countries with stockpiles of machetes, hoes, or Zippo lighters. All have been used for mass murder.

(March 13, 2003, from the New York Times) "Mr. Chirac offered Washington a way out, crediting the American military buildup in the Persian Gulf region and the threat of force for forcing the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, to disarm.

"'They have deployed 200,000 troops; they have already won,' Mr. Chirac exclaimed."

(March 11, 2003, from a February 11 speech by Bush’s father) If the United States had gone on on its own, had gone into Baghdad after Saddam and his forces had surrendered and agreed to disarm, the coalition would have instantly shattered. And the political capital that we had gained as a result of our principled restraint to jumpstart the peace process would have been lost. We would have lost all support from our coalition, with the possible exception of England. And we would have lost all support from the smaller nations in the United Nations as well."

(March 9, 2003) The New York Times has been doing a good job of covering the treatment of suspected terrorists in the various holding pens Mr. Bush has set up throughout the world. Much of what its reporters have found out over the last few weeks has been collected in today's paper.

The trick, it seems, is to cause extreme mental and physical pain by means that don't involve actually touching the prisoner and therefore don't really sound all that awful. Among these methods are semi-starvation, thirst, nakedness, extremes of cold and heat, sleep deprivation and being made to hold uncomfortable positions for exended periods.

This last method is particularly ingenious. No big deal, right? Just make a guy sit in an awkward position for a while. Except eventually the victim's muscles go into a spasm. Imagine a cramp in your leg that won't go away because you can't move to ease it. Now imagine a full-body cramp.

At the end of the story we learn something which should make each of us just a little bit prouder to be an American: "An Egyptian government spokesman, Nabil Osman… said many of Egypt's antiterrorism initiatives, like military tribunals, had been imitated by the United States. 'We set the model,' he said, 'for combatting terrorism.'"

(March 4, 2003) This is the last sentence in Newsweek's story about the capture of Al Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed near Islamabad last week: "Mohammed will be sent to an undisclosed location and interrogated, very thoroughly."

Snigger, snigger.

This is from a story in today's New York Times headlined, "Questioning of Accused Expected to Be Humane, Legal and Aggressive":

"In the case of Abu Zubaydah, an important lieutenant to Mr. bin Laden who was shot in the chest, groin and thigh a year ago when he was apprehended in Pakistan, American questioners teased him with occasional painkillers to try to cull information, officials said."

Teased?

What an extraordinary word to use in this context. The passage is awkwardly written but it seems to mean that the interrogators promised to relieve the agony of a wounded prisoner if he answered their questions.

(March 1, 2003) It has been widely reported that plenty of countries helped Saddam Hussein build up the vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons he once possessed — and that the United States was prominent among those countries.

But even careful readers of the papers probably don't know that Saddam's nuclear program was financed during the Reagan/Bush administrations with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia.

And that, in return, Saudi Arabia was supposed to get some of the bombs for itself. And that we have known about this petrodollars-for-A-bombs swap practically from its start in the 1980s.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at March 20, 2007 07:30 PM

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